Its the google phone app rather than a specific Pixel feature, I use it on my LG phone. You can download it from the play store and set it as the default phone app on any android phone.
Not to say other native phone apps won’t have this feature.
We went to Atlanta a few weeks back, stayed at a nice hotel, and had a nice meal at a fairly upscale restaurant. I used my credit card several times, including to pay for the hotel, for a light lunch, and at the upscale restaurant. The only time the card was out of my possession was at the restaurant, when the server took it.
Six hours after the dinner, two unauthorized charges appeared – one for DoorDash, the other for Uber. I called the card company and reported the fraud, and they got things resolved relatively quickly. I had a new card within a week.
I know it’s POSSIBLE someone hacked into the Embassy Suites database, or the system used by the place we got lunch, but I strongly suspect somebody at the fine dining place stole the card number. Which is frustrating; I’d think places like that would be fairly strict about card number theft.
not surprised, a lot of banks do. The question is when the frauds do happen, what do they cost you in lost time vs. how much you need to pay for the service.
Yeah, but how to enforce it? At least on my Discover card, all the information (number, exp date, security code) is on the back, in nice high contrast numbers my old eyes can easily read. Snapping a picture with a phone would be dead easy.
All you can do is be rigid about never letting the card out of your sight. If a waiter brings you the bill in a folder, ask him to go with you to the register to swipe it. It may seem rude or accusatory, but it’s either that or risk some a-hole stealing your info.
If you set up NFC (Apple/Samsung/Smart watch payments), they probably wouldn’t give it a second thought if you said 'I’ve got Apple Pay, I just need to tap my phone/watch on the machine". If they want to steal your CC info, they already know they’re not getting it from your device and the rest of the waitstaff probably don’t want to walk off with your phone anyway.
Luckily, wireless terminals are getting more and more common, so there should be less and less reason for you to give up your card anyway.
I’m still annoyed that when they started putting chips on cards, they didn’t go all the way to ‘chip and pin’. ISTM that would have knocked down a lot more fraud if the CC number was that much more useless without the associated pin.
I’m sure they are, when they catch the perps. That’s the hard part.
Maybe I watch too much TV. That said, if they know this is happening and they can isolate it to certain days, certain shifts, certain tables, couldn’t they work it back to the culprit?
( Otherwise, they’ll just keep doing it? )
My Apple Credit Card doesn’t have a number on the front or back, just my name.
In that case, plan to never eat at a restaurant more than once. Unless you like worrying about stray elements winding up in your food.
A card skimmer is small enough to fit in a pants pocket, so that’s probably not an issue.
I’m sure that most everyone realizes the risks with a credit card. That includes wait staff. Also I’m not a regular patron of any restaurant that has table service, so no worries.
This is one of those “I just have to be faster than you” situations – a crooked employee isn’t going to carry an obviously incriminating item on their person when they can just wait for some other victim with a visible credit card number.
I had a friend fall victim to this at a fast food place. The employee said the card reader wasn’t working and they’d have to take the card to the back. Note my friend is actually incredibly intelligent, just very, very tired after a long day at that point and hungry to boot after not eating all day, and dealing with small kids at the same time.
At any rate, within 15 minutes, there was a call from the bank. The employee had attempted to pay off their (apparently quite overdue) college tuition with the card.
It’s one of those things foreigners think odd about Americans. They (rightly) think it odd of us that we simply hand over our credit cards on a regular basis to complete strangers to process out of sight.
My wife and I haven’t written a check on our account in over 7 years. Early January I got a call from our credit union’s fraud department, someone deposited a check into a Bank America account with our account information. They placed a hold on the check. While on the phone she emailed me an image of the check. The name and address on the check was made up, the address was in Florida. My wife and I were off to our local CU branch to set up a new account, I had originally opened this account in 1986. After we got home and were making changes to some of our bills we pay online, we got a call from Bank America. It was their fraud department apologizing for not stopping the check. Sent us a $100 gift card for our troubles.
I was impressed some years ago when we drove up to Vancouver Island. At every place we went to eat, the server brought a card scanner to the table. I remember one of them was surprised that Americans didn’t yet use chip cards exclusively. I felt like a rube.
I used to work in restaurants and one day had a large table (about 16) of German tourists who wanted to split the bill. While my manager gave them a couple of bottles of wine on the house, after they requested the bill, I was in the office individually calling their banks (around 10) to clear the payments. This took probably an hour. I had all of their credit cards for this time.
These days everyone in the civilised countries (and I do not count the USA here, your banking sucks) has a chip on their card and NFC-enabled on their phone.
Being German, when tipping, they were not aware of local customs, so I got nothing. I don’t hold it against them, though. The restaurant where I worked had multiple cruise ship nantionalities in and out, so what you don’t get on Table 1, you more than compensated on Table 2.
It’s kind of cool that way. I would give Americans (guaranteed big tippers) the same service level as Chinese (notorious low tippers) because the job itself is not about the tip, though that’s where I made money, it is about making the restaurant guests happy.
Anyway… I think I have drifted off topic.
TLDR - you Americans need to implement chip cards.
I have five credit cards and a debit card in my wallet. They all have chips.
Yeah, America went to chips years ago. I still have one card that refuses to (so far) issue a tap card.
As said, Americans have chip cards. What we don’t have is chip-and-pin, which I believe many Europeans do.