Hacker News Reader

Comment by samsonradu | Hacker News Reader

There is also the option of having a Visa Debit Card and just pay from your own deposit account. Is that uncommon in the US?

View on HN

It's not that common in the US, because most financial advisors strongly recommend against it. If someone steals your debit card, they can clean out your bank account. You will probably get the money back, but you will be broke in the mean time. If you pay with a credit card and it gets stolen, the debt is frozen while they clean up the mess.

This is because: a. Almost all US merchants take all VISA or MC branded cards, while in Europe many vendors will only take debit cards because of lower fees.

b. The USA doesn't have chip-and-PIN, so it's laughably easy to use a stolen bank card. At least now with EMV and signature, someone has to actually go through the trouble of stealing your card instead of just cloning it. But there are still a ton of merchants that are just using mag swipe ...

Merchants who accept payments using the Mag swipe are now liable for any fraudulent charges. So any hold-outs will quickly switch once they get targeted.

I would expect banks to soon start limiting the amount that can be charged via the mag stripe to slowly close this loophole. $100 per transaction should be sufficient for the majority of use cases.

Gas stations are currently the major holdouts due to the cost of switching out the terminals on pumps.

I would think many, possibly most urban dwellers in the US are using debit cards to pay for food, coffees, etc. And chip-and-pin rollout has been going on for the last two years, most US cardholders now have chipped cards, but maybe half of merchants have updated their POSes to support dipping instead of swiping.

That's chip and signature, not chip and PIN. If you get physical possession of someone's card, you can scribble whatever you want on the receipt and you are good to go.

Europe uses chip and PIN, where you have to enter a numeric code at the time of each transaction that is used to unlock the card. So, you need PIN and card, the traditional what you have / what you know.

A lot of European banks even issue EMV readers that connect to your PC for online shopping and banking.

In the US, I see people paying with their debit card all the time. And we do have chip and pin. I'm confused as to whether I'm understanding your comment correctly.

We don't have chip and PIN here in the USA. Let me explain.

If you use your debit card as a debit card, you will be asked to enter your bank PIN, which is sent back to the bank and validated with them. That's different than EMV chip-and-pin, where the PIN is actually presented to the card itself to unlock it. So, your card has a chip and you enter your PIN, but it's not "chip-and-PIN" in EMV parlance.

If you use your bank card as a credit card, then you'll be asked to sign for your purchase just like if you used a credit card.

Here's a primer: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/us-dete...

And here's a list of chip-and-PIN cards offered in the USA (not many) http://www.cardrates.com/advice/chip-and-pin-credit-cards/

From what I've been able to determine (though I can't seem to get access to the standard which defines it without paying some amount of money, apparently ISO/IEC 7816), both types of chip and pin cards are covered and are appropriately called chip and pin. Do you have information otherwise you could share? It's hard for me to make an accurate determination here because I can't get access to the standard to see for sure. It's certainly included in the link below but I'm not sure how authoritative or accurate they are. I did research it more, I'm not relying on this one source, this one just seems like it's the easiest and most relevant to link to short of the standard itself.

https://www.cardfellow.com/emv-pin-debit/

Your linked list is of the "best", it is certainly not exhaustive. My chip and pin card, for example, is not listed (though a different one from my bank is, and I have seen no reason to believe they differ in this regard).

I use my debit card all the time. It's been stolen (cloned?) once; my credit union called when they detected it, and we went through the recent transactions and reversed the fraudulent ones.

In case the thief really does manage to "clean out" my checking, I usually keep most of my money in savings and only transfer back when necessary. Savings could probably be cleaned out too if someone has my PIN, but if one's just using it for credit transactions, then at least most of my money's safe.

That all said, I still do take a lot of precautions with my card. Namely: I only use it at places that I trust. Everywhere else, I use cash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com