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Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

This title is odd. Business that have ATMs instead of credit card machines are already cash only. It would be more accurate to say "without power to run credit card machines, Puerto Rico is cash only."

It would be nice if there was a credit card machine that was powered by the phone line directly.

Edit: Most of the small businesses I worked at growing up in rural Oklahoma had mechanical imprinting machines with carbon paper receipts so that they could process credit card payments offline.

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Once, at Cape Town airport, this really cool dude picked me up and showed me my rental car. iPad, Beats, old-school Hip Hop, the works...

When I gave him my credit card for the deposit, I expected him to use some fancy wireless reader, or maybe the iPad's camera to be used to scan it.

Instead, he took out a pencil and a notebook, and, within 15 seconds, made a perfect imprint of the card by placing it behind the paper and carefully painting the area with the pencil at a low angle.

That's essentially how they worked before instant electronic funds verification. Old timers like me remember when retailers would pull out a large metal slab with a cut out area for the card. They would put a piece of paper over it with blue carbon paper between two sheets and pull a slide from one side to the other, making an imprint of the numbers onto the piece of paper for the customer to sign. One copy would go to the customer, the other would be kept with the retailer.

For a while after electronic transactions companies would lug them out when the "lines were down," but I haven't seen one in quite a while.

Here is a "modern," light weight plastic version:

https://banksupplies.com/199-48500?origin=google-shopping&gc...

Yeah it's odd to think not too long ago that's how credit cards were copied. The big slidy handle machine went ka-chunk! A faint imagine from physically rubbing against your card with carbon paper was legit way to do it.

I always thought those were what Americans meant when they said their credit cards used magnet stripes because credit cards were rare and my country had already moved past magnet stripes when I saw the machines in American movies as a child. Using physical imprints seems like an obvious recipe for fraud, even more than magnet stripes (which already seem reckless compared to chips).

Don't forget searching for the card number in a book of stolen/canceled card numbers.

Obligatory Steve Martin reference: https://youtu.be/FCJx1uV38ZQ

"The Jerk, " was such a classic movie.

The, uh, minstrelsy part of that movie has aged poorly.

When they have computer/network problems, Chipotle breaks out their "crash kits" which include an imprinter. I've seen this at two separate restaurants. It never fails to make me laugh, and either because they don't do it much or the process takes longer (probably both), it is very slow. But it impressed me that they have a backup plan.

Unfortunately the imprinter fails on instant-issue cards without raised numbers, so it slows it down even more when they have to write all the numbers down.

We're unlikely to see them for much longer; my most recent credit card has the number as a sticker on the back, with no embossed printing at all anywhere on the card. (I've also got an even more recent debit card that does still have the traditional style. But it seems like their days are numbered.)

IIRC the ones without are “online” cards given out to for instance students.

My Citi-issued Costco Visa card has no embossed numbers. I figure it's just Citi being cheap.

My Chase Manhattan card is also like this, although it's some sort of metal-based chip card, much ruggeder than the old plastic cards.

Some taxis still have this for when their Square reader doesn't work.

>Most of the small businesses I worked at growing up in rural Oklahoma had mechanical imprinting machines with carbon paper receipts so that they could process credit card payments offline.

I wonder how prevalent this is still? I've heard of restaurants keeping one around just in case. I wonder what the fee would be for imprinted credit card transactions?

My most recent Citi DoubleCash card doesn't have embossed numbers. Could I still do an offline transaction?

Just last year in the deserts of the American Southwest with spotty telecoms I made purchases with credit cards where the seller just made a rubbing of my card on the carbon slips using the edge of his cell phone.

Clover has had an offline feature for payments on all our devices (except our dongle/peripheral solution). It's very heavily used -- thanks to flakey ISPs, routers, WiFi, cellular, etc. We often see people go for a day or two offline.

We let you set limits on count/amount/time of offline transactions. After you come back online we send email a report telling you how many offline transactions you did and how many authorized and didn't authorize. This serves as a feedback loop to encourage fixing connectivity issues.

None of my cards are imprintable; they are pretty much flat text printed plus chip. My chipped debit cards are outright something like inkjet-printed or something, no embossing, completely flat.

The embossing is simply a convenience. Numbers retain their numericy when copied by hand, just as when physically imprinted or electronically transmitted.

This is second-hand information but I have reasonable confidence in it:

PCI-DSS (payment card companies) requirements forbid the slabs' use anymore. You instantly fail your payment card audit if you have one on site, and that can cause you to assume liability for all subsequent customer fraud incidents for the next X months, and in bad cases massive fines and possibly losing your payment processing equipment licenses (the ability to take EFT cards of all types)

It's not considered secure storage of cardholder data, just as bad as if someone wrote down the cardholder information in full.

Interestingly enough, mail-order magazines still try to get you to write down your CC data directly. I wonder if that is sanctioned?

That is kind of nitpicky (the article makes it clear that they mean 'cash' in the sense of paper money, not non-credit). However, you recovered nicely with a story about mechanical imprinting machines. We'll take ATMs out of the title above.

the atm won't work for dispending new cash without the network and power, of course. it's no use to a company if they had say a generator without that bank network.

All you need to use a credit card machine is an internet connection and a device with a battery. And satalite internet still works.

Very few people had satellite Internet in Puerto Rico before the storm (And why would you? Landline worked fine and was cheaper). And now that it's after the storm, it's very hard to distribute those devices widely, plus people will likely have problems paying for them.

> And satalite internet still works.

Satellite internet is also very expensive too.

How long does a battery last without a way to recharge it?

So, electricity and a satphone. Both in very short supply there at the moment.

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