On 25/02/2012 16:21, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 15:48:40 on Sat, 25
Feb 2012, Graham Nye remarked:
When using my UK credit card in the US I only needed to sign for some
transactions.

There's some over-simplification here. While I agree that some retailers
(especially high-margin ones like restaurants) may not require a
signature, there's a second floor limit above which they have to call
the credit card company. That limit seems to me to be much lower than
you'd get in the UK for a similar transaction verified by PIN.

Having signed my CC bill in restaurants I was expecting a waiter
to come back and at least pretend to check the signature. But no,
you just sign and go, and they collect the CC slip when they clear
the table. Perhaps I didn't need to sign the slip (but they had
the usual pre-printed lines to sign along).

[Gas stations.]
There's some over-generalisation here, it depends where you are in the
USA; some places need payment first, others don't. It depends a little
on the local demographic.

Clearly it must have been crooked! Well, it was the Wild West (Arizona).


--
Graham Nye
news(a)thenyes.org.uk

On 25-Feb-12 10:58, Graham Nye wrote:
On 25/02/2012 16:21, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 15:48:40 on Sat, 25
Feb 2012, Graham Nye remarked:
When using my UK credit card in the US I only needed to sign for some
transactions.

There's some over-simplification here. While I agree that some retailers
(especially high-margin ones like restaurants) may not require a
signature, there's a second floor limit above which they have to call
the credit card company. That limit seems to me to be much lower than
you'd get in the UK for a similar transaction verified by PIN.

Having signed my CC bill in restaurants I was expecting a waiter
to come back and at least pretend to check the signature. But no,
you just sign and go, and they collect the CC slip when they clear
the table. Perhaps I didn't need to sign the slip (but they had
the usual pre-printed lines to sign along).

In practice, few merchants care whether the signature matches; how
strictly the rules are enforced depends almost entirely on the
merchant's chargeback rate. As a general rule, the industry tolerates a
"manageable" level of fraud because it's less costly than actually
eliminating fraud--mainly in lost revenues, not higher expenses.

S

--
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking