With the advent of chip-enabled cards, the major credit card companies are going to cease requiring signatures for transactions in a few weeks. However, it’s still up to the merchant and some smaller businesses are expected to continue requiring it for a time:
Both that “article” and the two it links show nothing of the sort although repeatedly claim so. They don’t compare any numbers to previous years or actual $ amounts of the fraud between years.
Unless I just missed it when I looked for any of the above…
The second referenced article on the boingboing one doesn’t even say it has risen, just “failed to stop” because merchants are choosing to use the fallback swipe methods. And obviously chip does nothing for CNP.
I wouldn’t be surprised if either was so. But nowhere does the article give any basis for the claims.
There’s another tidbit in the source article about “shimmers”, which sit between the chip and the chip reader and can record “track 1 and track 2 data when the payment card’s issuing bank neglects to check the dynamic CVV during the transaction.” This is news to me, because I thought the purpose of the chip was to encrypt the transaction, not just add a dynamic CVV while sending the static data in plain text…
Even though signatures are no longer required, the process of closing out a restaurant/bar ticket isn’t likely to change since it is while providing the signature that a tip is expected to be added.
I was recently in Europe and learned that if you want to tip a server, you are supposed to tell them that when you give the server your card, not later. Perhaps they’ve figured it out.