Should You Sign Your Credit Card?

[rbroome]

@Pantastic

Is there an example of this ever actually happening even once? That is, that the cardholder (you) dispute the charges, company says ‘no, you signed for these’, you say ‘no I didn’t, compare the signatures’, company compares signatures, then accepts that you didn’t make the charges because the signatures don’t match? It doesn’t make any sense - if the CC thinks you did make the purchases and falsely claim someone else did (which is theft), why wouldn’t they also suspect you of the non-crime of signing a signature that doesn’t look like your usual one?

As far as I know, handwriting analysis of credit card signatures is uses rarely if at all in investigating/prosecuting cases of allegedly unauthorized use.

It doesn’t demonstrate that at all. If they think you’re fraudulently claiming someone else used the card, I’d expect them to expect you to use a signature that doesn’t look like your usual one to support the fraud. It’s not like you’re unable to give a crappy signature when you choose to, and in the situation where you think it protects you the card issuer already thinks you’re a scammer.

I agree.
I strongly doubt that the CC company has ever compared signatures to see of a transaction is fraudulent. I doubt they even keep the signatures people make when they sign for a transaction. The signature one makes during the transaction is, as far as I know, useless. I could be wrong, but I have never heard of a case where it mattered.
Whether I sign clearly or not almost certainly doesn’t matter. I agree with that.

Pantastic also brought up the possibility that the CCC would use the signature to detect the particular fraud case of where I actually made a transaction and subsequently tried to refuse to pay it. Not sure about that idea, the possibility never occurred to me. If Pantastic is making that point, it goes over my head. I am only concerned with the case of someone else making a transaction with my card. That is what concerns me.

So, to get back to the original point-what good is signing the card? It doesn’t increase the usability of the card. Pantastic and Il agree it isn’t used as a security measure during or after the transaction. There is no use in the signatures at all. So I choose not to sign the card because as as best we can all tell, signatures don’t matter.

Why not go ahead and sign it if it doesn’t matter? Panastic and I could be wrong-perhaps the signatures are saved and compared and neither of us have ever heard of it. If that is the case, I certainly do not want to assist the thief in making a signature look like mine.

Signing the back of a CC is highly likely to be useless one way or the other. But if it does matter, I can only see a downside if I sign the card. A remote possibility, but I can see no upside.

[CookingWithGas]

@Jinx

I heard someone say they do not sign the backs of their credit cards. This way, one is forced to show ID when a clerk bothers to compare signatures. This sounds like a good idea all around. Thus, if the card is lost or stolen, they do not have your signature to forge. What does the SD think of this? Is it an extra level of protection for the card owner?

No. It is almost no protection for the card owner. If you have your credit card physically stolen, and you report it, your liability is ZERO. Even if you fail to report it, federal law limits your liability to $50.

The banks are willing to take this liability on because they want to make it as easy as possible for people to use their credit cards and would rather absorb some fraud rather than having people think, “I have to show ID? Nah, I’ll just pay cash.”

@Dewey_Finn

Some restaurants bring the credit card scanner to the table. That can be useful when the customer is paying with a debit card and needs to enter a PIN.

I have seen this everywhere I go in Europe or Canada but never once in the U.S.

@rbroome

I have been using credit cards for 40 years. I haven’t signed the back of a credit card in 30 years. The reason is simple. I don’t want anyone to forge my signature. If I lose my card, then the fraudster has to come up with a signature.

Forging credit card signatures is not a very lucrative business, crime-wise. By far the greater amount of fraud is committed online. I have never had my credit card physically stolen but I have had a few fraudulent charges, all of which were done online or by phone orders. If you report your card stolen or lost, all this about your signature is a moot point because the card will be declined. If the card is stolen or lost and somehow you didn’t even know it, your liability is limited. I am not familiar with any cases where a signature was forged with a stolen card and the bank insisted that the cardholder signed for it, but in consumer disputes the banks tend to side with the cardholder, not the merchant.

[Pantastic]

@rbroome

Pantastic also brought up the possibility that the CCC would use the signature to detect the particular fraud case of where I actually made a transaction and subsequently tried to refuse to pay it. Not sure about that idea, the possibility never occurred to me. If Pantastic is making that point, it goes over my head. I am only concerned with the case of someone else making a transaction with my card. That is what concerns me.

If the thought didn’t occur to you, then why on Earth are you concerned with someone else making a transaction with your card, though? If there’s a fraudulent charge, you dispute it and the credit card company takes it off your account and there’s nothing to worry about. It probably takes longer to find the number to call than to actually get the fraudulent charge removed. The only way it’s not simple is in the case you said you didn’t think about, where the credit card company thinks you actually made the charge but are claiming it’s fraudulent to con them, in which case the signature difference doesn’t work because you could easily fake a bad signature.

[Mama_Zappa]

@Duckster

…
While a merchant can ask for an ID to verify you are the cardholder, the merchant cannot refuse the transaction if you do not show ID when requested by the merchant.

Huh - then what would the point be of the merchant asking for ID? You could simply say no, and they’d still have to sell to you, right?

I’m a bit curious about the requirement for signature anyway. I mean, what clerk is going to be able to reliably match the signatures on the card and the receipt? Certainly my receipt signature is an unintelligible scrawl (often just my initials). And if it’s an electronic keypad, usualy the card is put away well before I’m done and I’ve never been asked to show the clerk the card.

So, in this day and age, what does the signature do?