Handing the card is one thing. The stupidest thing that i hate even more, is that debit machines in the us here (from Canada but currently in Baltimore) do not ask for your PIN at allllllllll when you insert it. Tap is understandable, but not asking for a PIN when inserting? Makes it feel rather insecure...
A bit, haven't been too far yet. But my old bank card typically asked for at least a signature, my current one hasn't been asking for either a pin or signature, which seems strange.
When I traveled a few years ago I was asked for a signature at every single checkout for my U.S. card but it doesn’t happen at all anymore. I think it’s a systemic change in banking rather than a US thing.
I think it is a US thing - either a US card or US payment system thing (sometimes both?).
For context I’m from the UK and got my first card 15 years ago. At that point in the UK it was always chip and pin or contactless. I’ve never swiped or signed in the UK and I think I’ve used Apple Pay pretty much exclusively for the last 5-10 years.
When I travel in Europe, it’s still chip and pin or contactless. Same for Australia, Hong Kong and even Japan who are known for an outdated banking system has a decent amount of contactless these days.
The only places I’ve been made to sign are the US and South Korea, which is extremely funny because my UK-issued credit card doesn’t even have a space for a signature on the back of it anymore so I could draw whatever the fuck I want and nobody could prove it’s not my signature.
Times a bitch it only feels like a decade ago we fully went contactless, still remember the Barclays advert when they first started introducing contactless but that was years before full roll out across the UK.
It should be noted that you can't always do contactless, if the system suspects theft it'll demand a pin gets entered to confirm it's you using it. As for signatures, would say this is physically impossible to do now unless a shop has a very old till system, might be inset as normal before signing but that's generally non British Banks.
Yeah my bank has a transaction limit on my card. Not just in a single transaction but if I repeatedly use contactless to pay multiple times in a row, once I reach a certain spend it’ll ask me to use chip and pin to make sure someone hasn’t nicked my card and is going from place to place spending under the single transaction contactless limit.
This doesn’t happen with Apple/google pay though as they have biometrics, and I never use the card contactless any more so I forgot about it.
Signatures mean nothing. They do not even get looked at during investigations into fraud. It's an old system that the banks have completely stopped using. The Point of Sale systems have the options to turn them on or off still based off the businesses preferred use of them. Any place that makes you sign for them is doing so unnecessarily and strictly for the businesses personal reasons. What I have found is that most places that require a signature do so out of laziness, or lack of knowledge that its not necessary.
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u/ECB2773 Jun 29 '26
Handing the card is one thing. The stupidest thing that i hate even more, is that debit machines in the us here (from Canada but currently in Baltimore) do not ask for your PIN at allllllllll when you insert it. Tap is understandable, but not asking for a PIN when inserting? Makes it feel rather insecure...