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Comment by anonymars | Hacker News Reader

To add on to that: if someone fraudulently uses your credit card, it's the issuer's money that's now missing and they need to get it back. If someone fraudulently uses your debit card, it's your money that's now missing that you need to get back. Hopefully things don't start overdrawing your account in the meantime.

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My experience with disputes isn't that....

Yes we'll open a dispute. Yes we'll give you a credit immediately. But then we just take the sellers word for it that they're trying to make it right and charge you anyway.

This is my one singular experience with a dispute but that's with a big bank getting almost all of my transactions over the course of years....

How come this is not a problem in Europe? Credit cards make same promises there, but usage is greatly diminished.

A very big percentage of credit card expenses in the US come from cards with rewards programs, so you get money/gift cards/travel discounts in exchange for using the credit card instead of the debit card. A lot of this is funded from much higher interchange fees: It's ultimately the merchant you buy from funding most of the rewards. Since those very high fees are nowadays illegal in the EU, European credit cards cannot have this kind of generosity, and incentives are very different.

How does this work when using a US credit card in the EU? I assume the merchant still pays the lower interchange fee, so are the banks just betting that customers won’t do a large proportion of spending abroad?

They exempt those transactions from rewards.

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