Ronda

A Spanish friend of mine told me that when she and her daughters were in a restaurant in Majorca, she presented her card at the table to pay for dinner. The waiter took it to another room to run the card. He took sometime and later she discovered that thousands of dollars had been charged against her card. So, don't let your card out of your sight.

grantop

I have to enter the 3-digit number when I process a credit or debit transaction in my store, along with the zip code of the address that the credit card bill is mailed to. If these don't match the transaction is rejected. If the number is scratched off (and in most cases people have no clue what their CVV number is) the transaction can’t be processed.

Just my 2 cents.

WillTravel

If the crook (the waiter in this case) runs the transaction, even if you are at the table, he has time to memorize the number.

xyz123

You know the bottom line of all this...

Yes you should take as many precautions as you can but no matter how careful you are....it happens...the idea is to minimize the damage. Like I said if 1 credit card number is stolen, yes to a degree it can cause some anxiety but for the most part by itself it will not lead to identity theft and generally you can deal with it by a letter to the credit card company disputing the fraudulent charges...no money is actually lost by you and generally that is the end of it...a debit card number being stolen in this way is somewhat more of a pain as you lose use of your money for however long it takes to put the money back in your account..that is why I think it is dangerous to use the purchasing portion of debit cards...I use them only for cash at ATM's or inside bank branches with the full understanding that it can happen even that way too...

These pieces of slime are becoming more and more sophisticated and the credit card companies seem to be a step behind all the time and of course this is what leads to higher and higher rates and fees on credit cards.

But for the reasons noted, as this is a travel board, I would take a couple of different cards and I check online daily the activity on the credit card accounts to make sure nothing is going on.

But you can't live your life as a paranoid...you do your best to minimize the chances of it happening and you are ready to deal with it if unfortunately it should happen to you.

Robespierre

grantop, your terminal was probably programmed by the same cretins who, in violation of the rules for program design, stored the thousands of PIN values that got hacked a couple of months ago. It's pretty obvious that there are some very ignorant coders on the loose.

<b>There is no reason to input a CVV with the card present, because with the card present there is no place for it to go.</b>

Most likely, the programmers got lazy and used the same program to input phone order and card present transactions. In a phone order, the machine operator would enter the CVV after the cardholder read it aloud. It is totally superfluous when the card is present. With a customer reader, the clerk never sees it anyway - but it's not needed, because the software knows that the card is present.

WillTravel, there is nothing the waiter can do with your name and number. Except perhaps defraud the card issuer. Period.

Maire

We've had 3 incidents of someone using our credit cards fraudulently. (Once was theft of actual cards; the 2 other times, we don’t know who or how the person got our info.)

Maybe someone else takes the financial loss, but I find it a major hassle to cancel, close and reopen accounts and cards, talk to the fraud departments of the banks and cc companies, sign affidavits, make police reports (not that that ever does any good), etc. Not to mention not having access to funds if your cards or accounts are out of commission.

Robespierre

Maire, the person(s) who charged stuff on your account(s) weren't able to do it by finding your number(s) in the street. They might have gone through your trash or the wastebasket where they worked, or any of a dozen other methods. <b>Guarding credit card numbers in and of themselves is a waste of resources.</b>

WillTravel

Well, yes, except as Maire explained, it's a major hassle when your hotel reservations are linked to a now-cancelled number, not to mention automatic bill payments, etc.

Robespierre

Yes, that's true.

It's also totally irrelevant to the question at hand: is there any danger in someone finding out your card number?

No.

Margo_Chester

Robes, yes these slime are quite sophisticated and what little we as individuals can do to protect ourselves against fraud seems silly compared to what they do on a daily basis. But; there is NO difference if the credit card number is found in my wastebasket or on the street - the number is still compromised and that is a hassle. It is way more than simply calling the credit card company and reporting the loss. Have you ever had to produce the card that your charged your train tickets to at the station to retrieve those tickets only to have to launch into the &quot;it's been stolen&quot; song and dance? Or tried to &quot;fix&quot; your automatic bill pay from overseas? Yes, it can be done, however it sucks up valuable vacation time and it's annoying to have to do it because some jackass found your receipt complete with number and went to town. Not funny, and I can't be as glib about it.

In all seriousness, has your credit card ever been stolen? I'm not being nasty, I just want to know if you've ever had to deal with that mess, especially when you are not in your own country.

Robespierre

Who changed the subject? I was discussing whether losing a receipt with your number on it can be a problem.

No.

Losing a credit card - or having it stolen - is an entirely different matter.

Sue_xx_yy

One point: there is no 'they' and 'you/us' when it comes to who bites the cost of credit card fraud. Although individual customers might not be charged when their cards are used fraudulently, customers as a whole (i.e., us) always pay in the end.

Viewed this way, protecting the CC companies from incurring losses amounts to protecting oneself.

Robespierre

I'm not &quot;customers as a whole.&quot;

I don't pay annual fees, and I don't pay interest on &quot;aged payables&quot; - in fact, I don't pay <i>anything</i> to use a credit card. So how am I paying for the credit card issuers' incompetence?

indytravel

Sorry Robespierre, but you do pay. It's the cost of the transaction charged by Visa to the merchant. Though not a direct cost to you, merchants must charge the customer more to pay for their Visa fees. Yes as a Visa customer you do pay for it.

I've run into that very directly and recently. At my local antique mall if I pay in cash I get a 10% discount over paying with Visa.

xyz123

....is it a discount for cash or is it a surcharge for use of the credit card? Was the cash price listed or the credit card price listed?

Visa contracts with merchants prohibit the following:

1. A surcharge for use of a credit card.

2. Imposition of a minimum purchase amount for use of a credit card....

...but they do permit discounts for cash.

Robespierre

There you go again, indy - changing the subject.

The discount points charged to merchants are not subject to change due to fraud (which <u>is</u> the subject). Annual fees and APR on unpaid balances, by contrast, are.

The card issuers would get the same pound of flesh from merchants if there were <i>no</i> fraud at all.

Christina

back to the original post which claimed all digits are shown on credit card receipts in France. Not so -- I just checked all my receipts from CCs in France last summer (a couple dozen, in many establishments and different cities), and my full CC number wasn't shown on a single one of them. In France, my receipts showed only part of the number -- the middle part, but the beginning and end were x'd out. I think they all did that, so that must be the custom in France or I had a very unusual experience in every single place I used it throughout the country.

Holly_uncasdewar

Since when does anyone stick to the subject? Is that a new rule around here?

xyz123

Oh come on...it hasn't strayed all that far off the subject...beware credit card numbers on receipts leads to possible fraud....so fraud on credit cards and its effects on people is certainly well within the topic.

Robespierre

Brilliant!

You got from card numbers all the way to cardholder costs without one <i>single</i> relevancy.

Card numbers don't lead to fraud, and fraud doesn't lead to higher merchant fees. Perfect. I don't know how you do it.

<i>Kudos</i> is what you deserve!