Identity Theft

[noxious.sunshine]

stop using debit cards to purchase things. keep track of your expenditures and use a credit card to make purchases; there's a lot more protection that way. Someone goes on a spending spree with your card, you get a call that day and they send you a new one. The charges are dropped and your cash is safe.

Has there been a spree lately? Yours is the third story I've heard this week!

I don't understand this though. Don't you need to input a code each time you use debit cards in the US? Isn't it possible to have a debit card that only works at card terminals in stores, and not on for example the internet? Even using my debit visa on the internet requires me to input a code from the code generator my bank gave me.

No one has ever ID thieved me, and I've never been incorrectly charged. I didn't use the debit visa when I was in Japan though. Well, I did, but only on 7-11 ATMs and then I used cash everywhere else.

If you're at like a gas station or grocery store or something or eating out, you can run it as credit, you just have to sign the machine or credit card slip as opposed to putting in a PIN number.

Why would I want to sign a machine when I can just input my PIN? I dunno how it is in the US, but I can use the PIN code practically everywhere over here, both for my debit card and my credit card. Inputting my code takes like 1.2 seconds, and that's a lot faster and less worksome than writing my name.

Signing with our names is almost exclusively used as a back-up solution in case a store's internet connection is acting up.

Some places won't let you run your card as Debit. Like when you go through the drive thru at fast food places or a drive-thru liquor store, it runs it as credit and you don't even have to sign anything. Dine-In nicer restaurants run your card as Credit. The liquor store we go to runs your card as credit if the purchase is under $30 - and no, they don't give you a choice in the situation.

Here, if you go into a gas station and they ask you "debit or credit?", depending on how much your total is, it's cheaper for them to run it a certain way. If it's under $30, they prefer to run your card as credit because the store will be charged $25 or so. If it's over $30, they prefer using debit because of this same charge. They still have to ask because of the way the registers are set up and you have to push a button or whatever, but yeah.