I was just glancing at a thread in the Pit about stores asking for too much information when making a purchase. I hate the add on sales and all that but** I wondered what the official guidelines are for making a credit card purchase. How much info is legally asked for?** I work at a small privately owned business and bad credit card debt really freaking hurt. Most customers are on the level but we need to have good information for the few who are trying to pull a fast one. The owners and the folks who do the paperwork in the office need to know that the employees are properly checking ID and there no way to know that unless they require certain information to be collected with every ourchase. I try to find safe shortcuts for the sake of customer service but if I get lazy and a bad purchase slips through when I didn’t collect the proper info, it’s my ass on the line. If you’re handing me a piece of plastic and want to take exspensive merchandise out of my store I need to be able to verify that the charge is a good one. These days that isn’t as easy as glancing at an ID.
Well, how about you ask Visa? Their merchant manual (PDF!) is available online.
The summary is:
[ul][li]You can’t charge extra for a CC transaction.[/li][li]You cannot have a minimum nor a maximum purchase amount for a CC transaction.[/li][li]You cannot require ID if the card is signed.[/li][li]You can only require ID if the card is unsigned. The cardholder is required to sign the card in your presence; you are then to match the signature to the ID.[/ul][/li]
More detailed than that, I do not know; I only ever worked in the authorization side of things, not merchant relations nor chargebacks. But AFAIK, if you follow Visa’s rules, you will not be liable for chargebacks that may occur.
Well, first of all, legal issues aside, if you read your merchant agreement with Visa you will see that you are actually in violation of that agreement if you have a poicy of checking every Visa cardholders identification.
One of the ideas behind a credit card is precisely that you should not have to go through a long identification process in order to receive credit. The company issues the credit card and vouches for the identity and solvency of its owner. And the merchant agreement for Visa (and, AFAIK, other cards like Mastercard) specifically state that you should check ID if you suspect fraud, but not as a matter of course.
What you are supposed to check is that the signature on the credit card slip matches the signature on the card.
I see. Well that makes sense and sounds familiar but there are problems.
A signed card doesn’t insure that it is not a bogus charge even if the signitures match. Many people don’t sign their cards {a bad idea} which means if a crook gets a hold of it they can use their own handwriting. I write “check ID” on all my cards. Sadly many still don’t ask.
Much theft is an inside job. Stores have to have a way to know their employees are following procedure. In the Circuit City I worked in an employee was allowing his crooked friends to make major purchases with stolen credit cards. In the modern market place telling employees to check the signature is not enough.
The problem is that the same policies that made CCs a convenience also made them ripe for fraud. In order to prevent that some of the convenience is lost.
We adopted the ask for ID policy to insure that all charge purchases were treated the same, to develop good security habits and prevent any profiling.
A new feature of credit card transactions is a point of purchase prompting by the cc machine to ask the zip code of the cc holder or the 3 digit security code on the back of the card. Some cards have that built in as a security feature, and it scans in with the normal use of the card. It’s a good security measure, as it requires additional attention to the transaction; not likely someone who stole your card will know the proper zipcode. Where I work, we do a lot of business via internet, and ship out, so we have the zipcode easily available.
Merchants get a small break on the normal 3% surcharge on CC transactions if they answer extra prompting info on the CC terminal. It’s not a great deal, but, every penny counts. My biz is fortunately fairly devoid of scammers, but I see the couple of extra questions about zip and other codes as a harmless method to avoid theft.
Is the US planning to move towards chip-and-PIN cards in the near future, as the UK did recently? It’s no guarantee against fraud, particularly card-not-present fraud (which is on the rise over here), but it has already made an impact on other types - http://www.apacs.org.uk/media_centre/press/06_03_07.html
I have a complaint about how the CC companies designed their cards.
I travel on business a lot. My company VISA bill runs up to 10K a month, and averages about 5K every month.
Why if they are trying to get the merchants to check the signatures do they put the flippin sig line right where it gets scrapped off when the card is swiped through the machine? :dubious: :rolleyes: :wally
You know the hologram over the last 4 digits of a VISA card number? Do you know what is under that hologram? I do. It’s a 16 cell grid with some letters and numbers in it. do you know what is under the signature panel on the back? It says voidvoidvoid. Oh and the security code? fuggitaboutit. Long gone.
People still take my card every single day.
I don’t think VISA is as serious about security as they say they are.
Then you are most likely in violation of your merchant agreement. If one of your customers complains to Visa that s/he was required to provide separate ID to complete a purchase, you may lose your ability to take credit cards at all.
Rick, Visa has no control over what a cashier does to verify your card, simply because Visa has no idea what the cashier is doing. Your problem is with the merchants who are not following card verification procedures. If you feel the merchants are not taking the procedures seriously, report them. Moreover, it’s the cardholder’s responsibility to get a new card issued when the old one appears worn out, whether or not the card has expired.
For Visa violations, contact the issuing bank – the phone number will be on the back of your card.
I’ve been told by someone who works for a credit card company that the signature on the card is not a security feature. Its purpose is to show that the cardholder has agreed to the terms and conditions of the issuer, not to be an exemplar of your signature. Store clerks are not forensic experts and are not expected to make a judgement as to whether the signature on the card is similar to the signature on the credit card slip.
That’s interesting and the kind of info I started this thread for. I’m sure the folks who issue cards must be aware of the problem with minimum security for maximum conviencence. I wouldn’t be surprised to see policies change, or maybe just better security built in the cards. Perhaps CC companies have a no enforcement policy when it comes to extra security. I’ve never jeard of a retailer losing their agreement for taking extra security measures. Have you?
No my complaint is not that the cashiers are not verifying signatures. Yeah they don’t. I understand that for the most part they are min wage drones, and don’t always follow procedures. My complaint is that the car is designed so that the only onboard security features (sig line and security code) get destroyed if you actually use the damn thing.
As far as it being my responsibility to replace, you see I tried. Unless I want to close my existing account and open a new one (leaving me without a card for say two weeks) they won’t just send me a replacement. How do I know this? I called them and asked for a new card.
As far as the comment about cashiers not be forensic experts, when my wallet was stolen 30 years ago, it would not have taken Dick Tracy to tell the sigs did not match. I saw the sales slips at the police department. Not even close. As a matter of fact they were so far apart Stevie Wonder could tell them apart. Everybody that saw them laughed and said it was obvious that it was not my sig.
Well, I’ve had one place refuse to sell to me because i have "ask for ID on my card instead of a signature. I thought that was strange.
What surprises me is that if we, the merchants are supposed to match signatures then why to the signature strips have so much dam writing on them to obscure the signature. It’s a very stupid idea if that’s for security. I concur that matching the signature is sometimes virtually impossible. Many people just scribble a little something that barely looks like writing at all.
Right. And it’s worse now. Sometimes the cashiers are just careless and sometimes they are in on the theft. Management needs some way to reduce possible cashier error. That could be through better security features built into the card or some procedure between customer and merchant at the checkout. Thumbprint sounds good to me.
It isn’t consistant and thats the problem. A scribbled signature is harder try and match if the purchase is bogus unless it has something really unique about it.
Then complain to Visa about your bank. I’d pretty much guarantee you that Visa could prod them into issuing you a new, replacement card based on the utter lack of security on your current card.
See on the back of your card how it says NOT VALID UNLESS SIGNED? Some merchants (and I applaud them) follow the policy as stated. The card is not valid unless it is signed, end of story. Many cardholders get very upset at this, but these are the same ones who tend to forget that the card is the property of the issuer and therefore subject to the issuer’s terms.
