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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Re: credit cards, unless you insist on using debit cards for some reason, who cares if they are compromised.

If someone steals my credit card, AMEX has a problem. I'll take reasonable care, but I'm not going to generate transaction specific numbers or whatever unless there is a strong incentive to do so.

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Because it's annoying to constantly get new credit card numbers. You have to update all your autopays. You can't get a new credit card instantly. Being denied due to fraud is embarrassing. You may be out of the country and stuck with a non working credit card. It's another thing to deal with.

I wish that it was much easier to generate temporary credit card numbers for all transactions. Like upon entering real number it would generate one and swap it for you.

I believe that's pretty much what Apple Pay and the like do.

Correct. My android pay says "a virtual number ending in xxxx was used to make this purchase." It would be nice if it was a token instead of an actual credit card number. I have no idea how is implemented.

Many had this feature (and Paypal for a while) but dropped it for some reason. My guess is they want to encourage subscription/repeat billing or some kind of fraud was rampant generating temporary numbers.

and AMEX passes the cost of that problem to all AMEX customers. You are still paying for it in the end.

how so? when a card is fraudulently used to make purchases, AmEx is not refunding you from their own pockets. they take back the money from the merchant it was fraudulently spent with (a chargeback). no loss at all on their side.

Which is then passed on to customers through slightly higher prices for goods.

But there is usually no way to opt out of this. Paying for it and not benefitting from it is lighting money on fire.

not really, prices are based on market demand. the market does not care about fraud issues and such.

whatever the theoretical rise in price would be (due to the fraud), don't you think the merchant would price things at that level in the first place to make extra profit, if they could?

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