My latest credit cards have the ability to pay transactions by simply wafting them past an RFI reader.
They also still have the card number embossed in raised numerals.
I haven’t paid a credit card transaction with a “flick-flack” machine for nearly twenty years, so why do the manufacturers persist with this ?
I don’t know what harm they’re doing you, but they’re really helpful to merchants if the power goes out or the terminal isn’t working. We still keep our old knuckle buster around for just that reason, and it still gets used a few times a year.
Sure, I could write down your card number and key it in later when everything is back up and running, but if there’s a charge back on it, having that around will prove to the processor that it was actually a card present transaction.
To this day, if my merchant account number changes (or I switch merchants), they still send me a new little metal plate to put in the machine that makes the impression in the carbon paper with my information. They’ll also send me all those carbon papers for free. I keep them fully stocked.
Just because you haven’t done something doesn’t mean there aren’t a sizable group out there somewhere who still do it. Visa thinks in terms of millions of retailers, not in terms of your personal behavior.
the raised numbers are easily visually readable. durable and easily put onto a card.
And also make them harder to counterfeit.
My Visa card was run through a machine last month. I cursed myself I didn’t have a camera.
It proved that nostalgia can be as good as it used to be.
When I was a wee lad and I delivered pizzas to pay rent and tuition I got hit with a charge back. I wasn’t held responsible for the ~$200 order but I got dinged for my ~$30 tip.
I discovered that placing a thermal paper receipt over the credit card and swiping over it with another card will make the same imprint as the carbon machine and proves that the card is present, even though it was keyed in over the phone. I never faced another chargeback after that but I sure would have felt clever if I did.
I had my card read the old fashion way about four months ago, at the car dealership. My card was a little bent, and for some reason the service adviser assumed it wouldn’t work in a standard reader.
PF Changs just reverted back to the old mechanical things when they found out their credit card info had been hacked.
The restaurant chain PF Chang’s has had an ongoing data breach that they have had trouble fixing, so they have resorted to the paper receipt method.
The embedded chip tap-and-go cards, btw, are incredibly insecure. Makes the magnetic stripe look like Ft. Knox by comparison. In the future in the US we will finally go to chip-and-PIN like most civilized countries. Not all that great, but a slight improvement.
“…like most civilized countries…” Hey! Thanks for the compliment!
Too bad that in Canada, chip-and-PIN cards are also tap-and-go cards.
I had my card run through a flick-flack this weekend. Some small or isolated places still use them.
And as another datapoint, when I opened an account here in Singapore, I left the office with my new cards, after they were printed in front of me. Consequently they don’t have the raised numbers.
Yeah, I just got a card from TD with the PayWave feature. I asked to get a new card without that feature; the CIBC Visa accommodated that request several years ago, but TD last month said “they couldn’t”.
In order to disable PayWave, I had to cut the antenna traces embedded in the card. You can follow the antenna by shining a bright LED flashlight (or your iPhone flash as flashlight) held flush against the back of the card. On the TD card, the antenna appears to run immediately below the raised numbers, then loop under the mag stripe and up the opposite side from the chip.
I made one vertical cut or deep scoring about a quarter inch in the center of the raised numbers on the back with a sharp utility knife, from the center of the numbers text to about an eighth of an inch below the numbers. I made a second scoring horizontally, between the signature panel and the magstripe, also about a quarter inch long, starting from about 1/16th inch from the edge of the card. I pressed hard enough to make a dent on the front of the card, but did not cut all the way through.
Based on a few tests, this appears to have disabled TD’s PayWave. If you feel the urge to do this, try to find the antenna loop first using the LED trick. If you Google on the internet, you will find that there are several different antenna patterns depending on who issued the card. As long as you don’t cut the chip area, you won’t disable the chip and pin technology that all civilized countries use; and meanwhile nobody will be able to read your card information with a remote reader either.
You do realize that contactless on a chip card is encrypted by the chip, right? It’s not like the US non-chip contactless, which simply transmits a copy of the magstripe data? This is one case where getting info from the US is doing Canadians a disservice, since Canada is now using EMV contactless…
I really don’t care. Basically, the promise was that to charge on my card, I would need to input a PIN. The idea that anyone could find a card and rack up charges just seems counterintuitive to the whole point of chip security. I wasn’t really worried about someone reading the data, I was worried about automatic charging.
There’s actually an ongoing problem right now with Chicago’s CTA system and the new Ventra card. It’s a chip reading system, and people have been getting double charged if they have both a Ventra card and a wireless chip credit card in their wallet, and tap their whole wallet instead of taking the Ventra card out to tap. Sometimes both cards get charged the fare, and sometimes the credit card instead of the Ventra card gets charged. The problem hasn’t been resolved per se, other than Ventra putting the word out to people to take the Ventra card out of their wallets to tap every time, or to put a protective sleeve over the credit card(s) they don’t want used.
As to the OP, my workplace has switched to the little reader dongle thingie on iPads for the most part, plus a reader attached to one computer. When at street fairs and conventions and other events away from our brick-and-mortar location, though, there’s not always a good signal or the app doesn’t work for some reason. So they keep the old carbon receipts with the flick-flack machine in the van as backup at all times.
Also, all the silver colored printing on my bank card has worn off. If my name, expiration date, card number, and security number on the back weren’t imprinted, they would be illegible in under a year.
It also freaks out customers less than seeing a clerk copying the card# & security info by hand would.
There’s that too. Honestly, if we’re using the imprinter, all I’m doing is waiting for the power to come back up and then keying in all those cards by hand. If you’re in that situation, you’re probably better off just paying by cash if you can.
In fact, just a few months ago I got one of those swipers from paypal (like Square) so when we do lose power I can just swipe cards on a phone instead of using the imprinter.