No More Credit Card Signatures!

[Trene4000]

Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S.

For nearly a decade, Doug Taylor, a sales manager who travels often for work, has signed credit card receipts with a doodle of a dog wagging its tail.

No cashier has ever rejected his “signature” as invalid.

“It gets a laugh, most of the time,” said Mr. Taylor, 44, who lives in Mobile, Ala. “Or they just glance at it and don’t really notice.”

Credit card networks are finally ready to concede what has been obvious to shoppers and merchants for years: Signatures are not a useful way to prove someone’s identity. Later this month, four of the largest networks — American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa — will stop requiring them to complete card transactions.

The signature, a centuries-old way of verifying identity, is rapidly going extinct. Personal checks are anachronisms. Pen-and-ink letters are scarce. When credit card signatures disappear, handwritten authentications will be relegated to a few special circumstances: sealing a giant transaction like a house purchase, or getting a celebrity to autograph a piece of memorabilia — and even that is being supplanted by the cellphone selfie.

Card signatures won’t vanish overnight. The change is optional, leaving retailers to decide whether they want to stop collecting signatures.

 

Target plans to eliminate them this month. Walmart considers signatures “worthless” and has already stopped recording them on most transactions, according to Randy Hargrove, a company spokesman. It will soon get rid of them completely.

Mastercard said it has been wanting to make the change for years, but held off until cards embedded with computer chips became common.

Card companies, which cover the costs of fraudulent credit card spending, started adding the microchips more than a decade ago to reduce fraud-related losses. The chips create unique codes for each transaction, making the cards much harder to copy. The chips have long been popular in Europe and Asia but only took off in the United States three years ago, when the card networks began punishing merchants that still relied on the old card-swipe technology. At that point, signatures became largely irrelevant in resolving fraud claims.

 

See full story here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/business/credit-card-signatures.html

[sekhmet2002]

That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about some of those things. I noticed at Walmart yesterday that I didn't have to sign for my card. It's one less step to go through which is always good.

[Vater Araignee]

Hey! We are going to put these chips in your cards so you don't have to sign sign for a purchase or even show ID, I mean you got the chipped card you obviously didn't mug someone right?

OH! Did me mention that they are more secure making it harder for you information to be cloned during a transaction? Just ignore that pesky little RF chip we still use so you can fast tap, I mean no one is going to figure out that it only costs $500 dollars for a unit that allows someone to steal all the information the new chip is protecting and do it from 20 feet away. And certainly no one will figure out that some $50 cellphones can get that information too, but hey they have to be real close and no one stands in a line close enough that they can get the phone within inches of a purse or wallet and look casual doing it.

 

Isn't convenience great?

[Troy Spiral (13)]

On 4/20/2018 at 5:57 AM, Vater Araignee said:

Hey! We are going to put these chips in your cards so you don't have to sign sign for a purchase or even show ID, I mean you got the chipped card you obviously didn't mug someone right?

OH! Did me mention that they are more secure making it harder for you information to be cloned during a transaction? Just ignore that pesky little RF chip we still use so you can fast tap, I mean no one is going to figure out that it only costs $500 dollars for a unit that allows someone to steal all the information the new chip is protecting and do it from 20 feet away. And certainly no one will figure out that some $50 cellphones can get that information too, but hey they have to be real close and no one stands in a line close enough that they can get the phone within inches of a purse or wallet and look casual doing it.

 

Isn't convenience great?

 

The standard in Europe for like a decade has been Chip in the card AND pin number.  Until we have both the chip is just sort of funny and mildly pointless.   Plus online transactions don't give a damn about chips nor signatures and never did.  

McDonald's has never asked me for a signature nor have other random places...  for the same reason stated in the OP, it's (mostly) pointless.  

[LadyKay]

Having worked in retail I can understand why a doodle of a dog  would go unnoticed.  Some of the people's signatures were unreadable. That and you got 5 other people waiting in line screaming at you if you dare to stop for a moment to question someone.