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In the US this isn't a major issue due to very consumer friendly legislation. This is omitting some details, but effectively you call your card provider and say
by tyoma 6y ago
In the US this isn't a major issue due to very consumer friendly legislation. This is omitting some details, but effectively you call your card provider and say you didn't make a purchase. Then its effectively up to the merchant to prove you did.
- ryanmarsh 6y agoSpeaking of omitting details. Consumer friendly legislation helps solve a problem that need not exist in the first place and saying this “isn’t a major issue” assumes: a) the consumer catches it in time b) the consumer has the time to deal with the bank (try calling Wells Fargo in the midst of COVID) c) it doesn’t cause the consumer’s rent check to bounce The US payment card system is not a good solution for the non-cash payments problem.
- ceejayoz 6y agoThat's not really consumer friendly. We wind up paying higher costs for everything because of this. The lost money doesn't magically disappear - the merchants have to include it in their costs. Actually fixing the problem - 2FA etc. - would probably be more consumer friendly in the long run.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoConsumers have been paying for merchant losses since before credit cards even existed. The price of shop lifting, robbery, burglary, ect... have always been factored into brick and mortar pricing (even if only via the cost of insurance). The cost of fraud is factored into online pricing. It’s not a problem that’s going to go away.
- ceejayoz 6y ago"It's not going away" is not a good reason not to mitigate.
- kelnos 6y agoIt really just depends on what you value most when it comes to "friendliness". If you value being able to just swipe your card or enter your details and be done with it, and not have to deal with 2FA prompts, remembering a PIN, digging in an app on your phone, or waiting for a code via SMS, then you might not mind the small price increases around the board to account for fraud. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but you can't define "customer friendly" in a narrow way that conforms to your personal desires and assume that's that. Also consider that if banks did have strong authentication around every purchase, there would be less of an incentive for banks or merchants to agree to roll over and eat the cost when there is fraud (and more ammunition for them against laws that require them to). No security/anti-fraud system is perfect, and something will always slip through; I wouldn't want to be a card holder stuck with a big bill because someone managed to clone/swap my SIM (for example) and make transactions using my card if I had no protection from that.
- ceejayoz 6y agoMy local Costco still isn't set up to handle chip cards at the gas station. No Apple Pay, either. That's just silly. Other countries had chip cards and contactless payments in widespread use a decade or more before the US even got support for them.
- tyoma 6y agoMaybe US issuers were much better at on-line fraud detection and didn’t need the newer system? Hoping someone from the industry can comment, but I was under the impression that US issuers were eventually forced into EMV, after dragging their heels, because the US became a prime market for cashing out mag stripe data from non-US issuers.
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoNot because they are better at fraud detection, but because US issuers levy much higher fees from their customers across the board and so can eat more fraud-related losses.
- tyoma 6y ago2FA would also have higher costs for consumers, possibly much higher costs due to customer support staff and having to reset that second factor.