I know this has been covered before. But this is the jist. Is this a state by state thing or a national reg? More and more, when i try to pay in a store with a Mastercard, I am requested to present other ID, like a drivers’ license. My signature on the card is a promise to pay. But can businesses do this; reject credit card payment if there is no other ID to back it up? According to the agreements between MasterCard, Visa and merchants that I have seen, there is no rule that a purchase can’t be made if other ID is not present (except in the cases of liquor or tobacco sales). Can anybody back me up on this?
I think its a contract between the place in question and Visa/Mastercard
It’s the merchant’s agreement between the credit card company and the merchant.
Visa merchant agreement (PDF warning) - Page 29 has this:
(Bolding is Visa.)
I don’t have a Mastercard so I don’t have their merchant agreement at my fingertips. Any MC Dopers who can help?
Pretty much what they said. I do know I can refuse a sale (at least in my store, I can’t say about others) if the card says something along the lines of “see ID” and the customer doesn’t have one, or it doesn’t match the name on the card.
What I find happens on the odd occasion that I get pissy about insisting that my signature is good enough is that the clerk has to call the store management over, and store management then insists upon dragging out an old card impression machine (usually they keep a knuckle-buster around for this), taking the impression and having me sign. But I’ve never had a place totally refuse to sell to me on the basis I refused to show identification of who I was.
The buck stops with the merchant.
If somebody swipes your Visa card and goes to Best Buy and gets a 61" plasma before you notice your card is gone, Visa will not hold you responsible for the charge. But do you think Visa is eating that money? Hell no. They draft it back from the merchant who accepted the stolen card. The thief didn’t steal from you or from Visa; he stole from Best Buy.
Merchants therefore do everything they can to keep this from happening – including asking for ID’s. Even if, according to Duckster’s post, it’s written in the agreement that merchants cannot refuse to accept a card if the cardholder refuses to present ID, they do it anyway, and frankly I don’t blame them a bit. They’re the only ones who get screwed if the purchase is fraudulent.
Oh, and “See ID” is not a valid stand-in for signing your card. The merchant can legally refuse to accept the card in this case.
:dubious: I wonder why they would do that, it doesn’t make sense. We have to keep that machine (personally, I call it the cachunker) for when the card won’t swipe. It’s so that if we have to key in the card, it proves that the cashier had it in their hand at the time of the sale. What it would do in the case of you not wanting to present an ID is beyond me.
Well, the Country Kitchen store in North Canton by Stark State College certainly requires me to show ID, even when I escalate to management.
When asked why, I indicated that I don’t want to share my date of birth or address with their staff.
“Who the hell is your cashier, and why should I trust her with this information? I don’t know her.”
In Canada they’re going to a Chip & PIN system where a PIN is needed for all purchases, whether the card is debit or credit. The “Chip” part means the cards have a chip embedded in them and they are meant to be inserted into a chip reader rather than swiped – although they have a mag stripe as well.
The changover is mandated for sometime 2010 but a lot of merchants are upgrading early because, if the card is presented and the PIN entered, the merchant is off of the hook even if the card was stolen. Another advantage is that the chip is interactive. If the terminal is having communications difficulties getting to the network to find out from the issuing bank whether the card can take the transaction, the chip and the terminal huddle and decide between themselves whether to let the transaction happen, and record it on the card if it does.
The same system is popular in Europe I’m told, but there is resistance to the idea in the U S.
http://www.mastercard.com/za/wce/PDF/12999_MERC-Entire_Manual.pdf
I cited some other good resources on this in my staff report: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2819/is-it-safer-not-to-sign-the-back-of-your-credit-cards
Not correct. If a merchant follows all of the association’s rules at the time of purchase, the merchant cannot be held liable for a fraudulent transaction. This means primarily that they must obtain a signature and compare that signature to the one on the back of the card. (See starting on p. 19 of the document linked by Duckster.) If the merchant follows the procedure and the transaction is authorized, the merchant will not be held responsible for the charge. However, most clerks are not well-trained or too timid to challenge a customer, and there are certainly cases where the merchant will be held responsible for fraud, only because they didn’t follow procedure[sup]1[/sup].
However, if the card is not present and the merchant did not verify the verification code (Visa, MC, Amex all have different names for it), then a fraudulent transaction could be charged back to the merchant. I used to manage payments systems for a large Internet merchant and we had a huge problem with chargebacks because we were favorite place for fraudsters to try out card numbers they had stolen; we were one of the early adopters for real-time authorizations online.
Many merchants will not even require a signature for small transactions. In those cases, I don’t know if they have a special agreement with the association to allow it, or whether they simply absorb the risk since the losses would be relatively small (McDonald’s meal for $5.99).
- There is an infamous web site by a guy who decided to test merchants on this. He used more and more outrageous “signatures” on his credit card slips to see what would happen, and was never challenged. In such cases, if the cardholder complained that they did not make the transaction, an investigation would show that the merchant clearly did not follow the required procedure and the merchant would have the transaction charged back.
Yes. The card companies started offering this as part of their agreements a while back. I posted some cites about this in a previous thread. I’ll see if I can find them. And arguably, small losses might not be the only problem. Continual non-compliance with the agreement could lead to termination of the agreement or other similarly bad stuff.
ETA: Here is an article about the no-signature transactions program: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/popular-credit-card-introduce-no-signature-cards-1273.php
Not exactly the same but here is a link to a funny prank regarding credit card signatures http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/.
In theory, yes, you are right.
But if a crook learns to forge a reasonable enough facsimilie of the signature on the card to fool a store clerk (or they get lucky enough to steal a card without a signature and can add one in their own handwriting), and the cardholder asserts that it is not their signature on the receipt, the decision will almost always go against the merchant. I have dealt with some very angry business owners over exactly these kinds of scenarios.
My experience was only with a card-not-present merchant, so I don’t know much about how forgery cases are actually treated in practice. I just know what our merchant acquirer (Chase Merchant Services) told us. If things work like you describe that really sucks for the merchants.
That’s the same website CookingWithGas linked to just two posts previously. It’s good, but it’s not THAT good. 
At many gas stations I now have to enter my zip code at the pump. How does this relate?
It’s part of an Address Verification System designed to prevent fraud: http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/17/zip_code_turns_into_a_fraud_deterrent/
Unless the cashier is a hand writing expert the agreement with Visa doesn’t really mean anything. I personally would prefer if my card was verified in some manner.
The real problem with this is VISA (nor MasterCard) will actually DO anything about this.
If you contact VISA they will tell you that you need to contact your issuing bank. Do you think the issuing bank cares. Hardly, they’ll make a half assed attempt but nothing is solved.
Yes they could pull the merchants machine but I’ve dealt with this almost my whole working career, and I’ve never seen them pull anything for something like that.
There’s no incentive for the bank to help you make it easier for fraud to occur. So any attempt at seeking a resolution will be small at best