Based on experience, banks also sometimes choose to honor charges made against debit cards that draw more funds than the accounts actually have.
I can dig up a First Merit Bank statement for a cite if needed.
Page 134 of my link speaks to whether or not ID can be requested by a VISA merchant. In the vast majority of cases, the answer is no.
I suspect if you go back in to the literature, it says that you can use your Visa debit card* for purchases *anywhere you’d use a Visa credit card. For purchases - not for deposits or for pre-auths (which is what the car rental place wanted to do).
Merchants can choose to accept Visa Debit, or Visa Charge or Visa (both), they must display the correct logos. Also this acceptance is only for cards issued by USA banks (Assuming you’re in the US). For example a person with a Canadian Visa Debit would be allowed to use it regardless.
The thing is the merchant cannot pick and choose what transactions. If the merchant takes a Visa Debit card he MUST allow you to authorize it. We do it all the time where i work and it causes no amount of endless headaches, cause people don’t understand.
Car rentals are the worse, about 3 years ago I rented a car and went to check in my hotel and the credit card was declined. I said “What?” It had $20,000 of credit on it. I found out the Hertz had authorized the card for the FULL $20,000.
Boy was I mad, I went down there and told them off good. LOL
The thing is Visa, MC and the like all have rules but they are largely unenforceable.
For instance I see signs saying “minimum purchase amount,” or merchants that charge a fee for a credit card or require ID when using Visa. You can’t do these things, but so what? Visa doesn’t care, if you report it to them, they will email you back telling YOU to contact the bank of the COMPANY. That is the merchants bank that the company has. How likely are you to find that out.
And before anyone says, yes a merchant can ASK for ID but that merchant cannot make it mandatory for you to produce ID as a condition of purchase.
There are different logos for Visa Debit and Visa Charge, and both?
Sounds like you got an untrained VISA employee.
If you call up VISA international to complain they’ll tell you to call the bank THAT ISSUED YOU your card, not the one that issued the vendor their credit card machine/agreement/whatnot.
If you insist, VISA international will, in fact, take your complaint directly over the phone. I lodged such a complaint and received a letter in the mail the next week explaining the situation. [Yes, the local Europe Gyro is permitted to charge me a service fee for taking my VISA card…]
A pre-auth is done on every transaction. The steps of a transaction, whether it is credit card or branded debit card, is:
Authorization: This is what you are referring to as a pre-auth. If the bank authorizes the transaction then the merchant is giving an authorization number and that amount is held against the cardholder’s balance. At this point the merchant is guaranteed to get paid.
Settlement: The merchant uses the authorization number to submit a transaction that actually causes the money to move from the cardholder’s account to the merchant’s account.
The settlement can take place immediately after the authorization. Settlements are also commonly sent in batches once a day. If a transaction is authorized but never settled, the auth usually sticks for around 3 days, but the time period is at the discretion of the cardholder’s bank.
I managed billing and payments system for an online merchant for a few years. I remember one case where a bug in our system had caused multiple auths for the same transaction and our customer was stranded someplace unable to buy a plane ticket. I was on the phone with his bank explaining that we were not going to settle the transactions and they agreed to release the hold.
CookingWithGas, you’re confused. They do have different rules for card-present and card-not-present transactions, but the rules I was refering to were for displaying the logos for Visa, and it does indeed show different logos for Visa Debit, Visa Charge, and both.
I don’t think this is correct. I, at least, use the tems “debit card” and “check card” interchangably. I’ve never seen a card that never required either a signature or a PIN–though some merchants are no longer requiring them for small purchases, regardless of the card you use. McDonald’s is an example. (I have no idea how they dispute chargebacks, but I imagine the number of them is sucha small percentage of transaction [How many credit card theives are going to rsk getting caught just so they can get a Happy Meal?] that they just don’t bother.) With my card, I can request to use either a signature (by having the store run it like a credit card, meaning they pay a slightly higher fee, but VISA still treats it as a debit card) or a PIN. I think the debit processors are all owned by credit card companies, so all debit/check cards have a Visa or MsterCard logo now.
I was speaking as a customer service drone, not a billing manager. As a customer service drone, there is one button to push to charge a card and one button to push (labeled “Pre-Auth”) if I just wanted to hold space on a person’s card until they returned, say, my rental VCR. It was that second transaction, known in Blockbusterese as “running a pre-auth” that caused all sorts of bother and fuss when debit cards started bearing Visa logos, and that same sort of transaction that Enterprise informed me still causes all sorts of bother and fuss, which is why they won’t accept a debit card, even with a Visa logo, for their rental cars.
And yet they do anyway. Here where I live, and in Texas and Vegas when I was traveling. :rolleyes:
A check card is like a debit card that operates through a credit card system like Visa or Mastercard. At the point of purchase, it’s just like a credit card and you sign the little credit card slip. However, instead of issuing you credit like a credit card, it’s treated as if you wrote a check on your bank account.
Yeah, it’s all fun and games 'till they get reported a couple of times by a couple of different customers.
Apparently no one actually bothers reporting them.
Wouldn’t be the first time… 