Also how is magnetic strip still a thing? I thought this was replaced with chip and tap years ago...
Sometimes I don't when my local ATM is down (which seems to happen so often...), but when I can it feels much better to me. No digital records, no potential for this type of skimmer or other scam, don't have to give up my ATM pin, no worrying about my phone running out of charge, able to give it away freely to anyone in need without setting up a digital transfer, the old taco truck still only takes cash, etc.
I will be sad when cash starts to be less accepted. Already there are a (small) number of modern restaurants that don't accept cash in my area.
Is that even legal?
[1]: https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3...
[2]: https://nypost.com/2021/12/04/nyc-businesses-told-to-pay-up-...
"There is no federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law that says otherwise."
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
It may be illegal to refuse cash as payment for an existing debt but businesses are free to choose how (and with whom) they conduct business, including which forms of payment they accept.
They can be mad about it, but I don't think I'm breaking any laws by not having their preferred payment method to pay that debt, right? They can even ban me from the restaurant but—for that meal—I can't get charged with theft of services (or whatever the innkeeper laws are that relate to this situation)
"All debts, public or private"
I don't understand. How are you not exposed to this type of skimmer when it only attacks those who use cash ATMs, like what you do?
Not exactly a grocery story, but it wasn't a single skimmer either.
Wow. This year in my area, a lot of the restaurants started charging 3% extra if you DON'T use cash.
And generally, in my state of Montana, there are still restaurants that won't accept credit cards at all.
Is it really no digital records, or just fewer/obfuscated digital records? I would think that the ATM keeps tracks of the serial numbers of the notes it gave you?
The impetus to get retailers to start using the chip was "Liability shift". The payment networks gradually changed the rules (I think in the US pay-at-pump gasoline purchases were last to get this, while big retail stores were earlier) so that the liability if a transaction is latterly discovered to be fraudulent is with the retailer who accepted the dodgy transaction, not the payment network if the retailer didn't use the chip.
But I imagine if you're a little store in the country, maybe you do six card transactions per day, almost all of them with customers you know personally who just find the card more convenient, liability shift isn't a huge worry for you, while the cost of a new payment terminal is a significant issue.
The actual payment infrastructure doesn't care about any of this. Those old impression machines? Mag stripe? Put the card in manually? Tap your iPhone? In all cases the actual transaction which moves money, "Settlement", just needs the account number to take money from and amount to transfer. These different methods have different "Authorization" behaviour but Authorization is about mitigating risk for the retailer, and the bank, and only very tangentially intended to have any benefit for you to customer, it doesn't move money, and it isn't mandatory.
Good point. Not only do I still have cards with mag stripes, I still have some with embossed numbers. And probably half of the people with credit cards are younger than the date when that was obsoleted.
Maybe 50% of places around me accept Apple Pay but I haven’t personally had a card impressed in ~22 years.
And it means everything you buy is associated with you and recorded forever to be sold to endless advertisers (and worse) and the transaction may be blocked by third parties.
If you pay cash it works without a depending on anything external (no internet, no electricity), it is not traced, it can't be blocked by third parties.
Cash is the optimal payment mechanism for nearly everything. It only is inconvenient for very large payments, but for anything day-to-day, opt for cash.
If my credit card is stolen, I get my money back (so long as I reported it in time, and didn’t surrender to them my pin). Not so with cash.
Cards take a second or two to process payments on average. Not so wish cash.
My bank account / credit card limits always have enough to cover my purchases, whereas my physical wallet might be low/empty and require a trip to the ATM / bank for a withdrawal.
Re internet/electricity outages, this is so rare enough to not be a concern. POS can also do offline transactions just fine if you have power but no internet. And a lot of retail and critical infrastructure places have both wired and cellular Internet links for high availability.
There is definitely still a place for cash, but it’s not a big thing for a lot of people anymore.
The last time I used cash it was because my kid threw up in a taxi and I needed to quickly make it up to the driver. Yes I could have paid card as well, but seeing the physical cash was likely more meaningful to de-escalating the situation.
Security == privacy. And cash certainly wins availability by a long shot, it can't be blocked by any kind of outage. Convenience is arguable I suppose. I'd rather hand over cash than deal with anything electronic that can fail.
> If my credit card is stolen, I get my money back (so long as I reported it in time, and didn’t surrender to them my pin)
Credit cards don't have a PIN, that's a debit card. But yes, you get the money back from fraud with a credit card, that's true.
> Re internet/electricity outages, this is so rare enough to not be a concern.
Depends where you live I suppose. In many areas electricity outages are a daily occurrence.
They do in most countries.
Debit cards, however, are downright nazis about PINs.
I wasn't aware that Chip+Signature cards even exist in europe.
Whereas the US is all over the place with different methods for different cards, and mag stripes still in use, sometimes requiring you to enter a PIN alongside that, all largely driven by retailer reticence to update their hardware.
I’ve lived in 4 continents, never had daily, weekly, or even monthly outages.
> Security == privacy. And cash certainly wins availability by a long shot, it can't be blocked by any kind of outage.
If you don’t have enough cash in your wallet then you don’t have any availability. If you have a internet outage your debit/credit cards still work offline.
Also security does not equal privacy. If you are living in a state where this is true, you have bigger issues with the entire system than ATM skimmers.
> Credit cards don't have a PIN, that's a debit card.
Everywhere I have lived bar the US has PINs on all card types. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes ubiquitous in the US too.
Not when the store is offline.
The convenience store just up the street from here every now and then goes cash-only whenever their connectivity is down.
This is definitely not true in my part of the US. Internet outages are not common, but they're also not rare. I see it happen 3 or 4 times per month.
FYI, you don't need internet connectivity to pay using apple/android pay.
And waving my phone at a payment device is massively more convenient than having to go to an ATM to withdraw cash, and then pay with said cash.
There are also quite a few payment terminals that still do dial-on-demand to get authorisation from the merchant service provider (Chip&PIN/NFC Contactless).
I still see those in the UK especially at independent fuel stations. The additional delay waiting for the terminal to dial and connect sometimes makes me think it has failed - had a few occasions where the line was busy and the terminal redialled several times before it finally made it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscalization
If you want to sell anything to anyone, and you're in the VAT system, you have to be online at all times.
Personally I default to chipped credit cards but carry a few bucks with me too.
Also in general I don’t like to be utterly dependent on my phone especially if I’m traveling.
Merchants not having connectivity is a rather small problem in this day and age really, with ubiquitous mobile data connections. (Yes, I am aware someone will be along shortly to tell me they have yet-another-edge case where it doesn't work for them. I don't really care, for the vast majority it is a massively convenient way to conduct business.)
So I have no risk of some company unrelated to my banking erasing my digital existence and making me unable to pay.
That's my use case.
But it does seem like the more secure these systems are getting, the less robust they are. Perhaps that's just one of the tradeoffs we have to accept. The college football season started with a game between Nebraska and Illinois in Dublin, Ireland. The beer at the game was free because there was a technical issue with the payment provider. Being a "cashless stadium", they simply had no way of accepting payment.
My recent cards (and not only mine, I saw that happen with others people cards too) just tell the terminal they can't be used by a mag stripe at all. I assume what the terminal without a smartcard/payless should allow a mag strip read, but I haven't seen them for like... 10 years? But I'm not in the US of A, for that matter.
To be fair though, after seeing physical Canadian money (got some bills and coins for my son), US money isn't nearly as cool.
I think (in the UK), raising the contactless pay limit, and then all the places that just moved to fully cashless over covid accelerated everything.
I know it's a priveledged position to say it, but contactless is great and I absolutely don't miss cash and coins.
And the fancy Amex tap card barely works -- Apple Pay is more reliable.
I admire your uncomplicated, predictable life.
Sometimes I want to buy something from a guy with the ice cream cart at the park. Sometimes I need to tip a valet, a doorman, a hotel maid, or another service worker. Sometimes I want to buy Girl Scout cookies from the girl with the table on the corner. Sometimes I want to buy something from one of the 35 million Americans without a bank account. Sometimes tow truck drivers take cash only. Many of the late-night restaurants and food carts in my city are cash only.
Some day I'll go cash-free. But my life is not yet that simple.
>Sometimes I want to buy Girl Scout cookies from the girl with the table on the corner
I have seen a lot of them carry Square dongles or accept Venmo payments. I guess they got tired of people telling them they do not have cash.
You can still count on old gas pumps and pay parking kiosks using mag stripes.
As for parent claiming my life is “uncomplicated” and “predictable” I won’t say they’re wrong. I have a pretty boring yet comfortable life.
Cash-only is far more prevalent than card swiping, and even that is incredibly rare.
2) In non-business "mode" it's still not your choice if the sender tags it as 'goods or service.'
3) Customers and Workers may be wary to potentially violate ToS by defrauding Venmo and/or the IRS by falsely tagging a transaction that there is an easily electronically auditable record of. Venmo ToS explains your account may be terminated and funds 'held' if you do this, and tons of random people sending you money on a regular schedule is easily identifiable as not 'friends and family.' This is far easier to trace than someone spending putting $200 in singles in a drawer at the end of the night and spending $20 x 10 at the grocery store.
4) Your 'pass-through' rent situation is far less falsely identifiable as goods and services income. 2000x people sending $5 over a year is far more identifiable to a computer than the exact same few people sending you $1k a month or whatever. A very large number (high hundreds to thousands) of nodes sending small amounts over the course of the year easily 'sniffs out' someone providing goods/services and can be bet on to be found out by Venmo compliance sooner or later.
0. https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4407389460499-2022-...
> Sometimes I want to buy something from a guy with the ice cream cart at the park.
The ice cream van that comes past our house is contactless card-only.
> Sometimes I need to tip ...
Ugh, tip culture!
> Sometimes I want to buy Girl Scout cookies from the girl with the table on the corner
She's probably got Square.
> Many of the late-night restaurants and food carts in my city are cash only.
Where they exist, they're more often card-only here.
This is not to say one is superior to the other, but it is very geographically and culturally dependent. If I had to choose to leave the house with either my Apple/Android-pay enabled phone or a pile of cash, the phone would get me a lot further in this country.
It would have been nice to have a backup.