Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks
metin.nextc.org
metin.nextc.org
If it was leaked somewhere else, i think they wouldn't bother logging in some unrelated account of mine in an ecommerce website.
Blog post from Stripe:
https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-a-card-account-upd...
It's bad service from GP's card company though, with network tokens they should be able to see which specific token was abused, and revoke just that one.
It was quite confusing, because a) I received a replacement physical card several months before the card expiry, so by the time my watch stopped working I'd entirely forgotten about it, b) there's no indication anywhere in the Android/Wear OS of what the expiry date is or that it might be expired and c) there's no indication at the point of sale that the virtual card is expired, simply a generic "Declined" message.
like
Visa: Visa Account Updater (VAU) https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau Mastercard: Automatic Billing Updater (ABU)
it worked fine for sometime, but the problem is that now the stolen credentials are being refreshed now as well.
Practically, it's of course not that simple or clear-cut. As most things in payments, this too is a trade-off of cardholder inconvenience, support effort, fraud losses etc.
The token itself does also have an expiry date (it's a mandatory field in most protocols), but that can be updated as well, I believe.
It's called Automatic Billing Updater (ABU)
the idea is that if you ask for a new credit card after being stolen, your say utility providers or other like netflix subscriptions can seamlessly switch over to the new credit card number.
it worked fine for a while, but of course the problem is that afterwards the stolen credit card credentials started to be refreshed as well.
(used ai to fetch the list below).
Visa: Visa Account Updater (VAU) Mastercard: Automatic Billing Updater (ABU) American Express: Cardrefresher General: Recurring Payment Tokenization
This is highly dependent on your bank. For example, Bank of America lets you view and delete any cards that have been added to a digital wallet right on their website.
Theoretically, it would allow a pretty neat feature of being able to manage all merchants that have a copy of the card in the banking app and revoke said copies – but since token use is not mandatory, that would be fairly confusing, so I haven't seen this yet as far as I remember.
FWIW, India has taken a pretty radical step towards that future at a regulatory level by effectively mandating merchants to no longer store the underlying card number and use tokens instead. I suspect that such an interface would be more common there, but I don't have any personal experience.
Only digital wallets. Specifically, Apple Pay, Garmin Pay, and Google Pay.
Heaven forbid if I try to add a card to an Apple Wallet on a Mac where no iOS or Android app exists.
one or more of those digital wallets are some subscription supporting thing, and if that auth failed or had an address mismatch or wrong kind of card, they will disable your account until you update your card.
Settlement the part where the bank agrees to transfer money from your account (in this case increasing your debt on the card) to the merchant is completely separate from Authorization.
Authorization is the modern EMV ("Chip and pin") authentication, the CVV stuff for online, and any other mechanism by which the bank protects themselves from your fraud and, maybe, as an afterthought protects merchants.
The network is completely OK with Amazon saying here's a card number, we say they're paying us $400. That's just a settlement, goes on your bill. No sophisticated cryptography, nothing even as clever as a 4 digit PIN, or remembering your mother's maiden name, just OK, we trust you. Which means you, as a consumer, need to read your credit card bills and dispute anything you don't recognise or you'll pay.
There is very little incentive for the networks to care if you get ripped off. If you don't dispute it then everybody is happy, and if you do they just claw it back from the merchant and it's not their problem.
This is true for non-3DS online payments, but not for in-person payments or when using 3DS online. In those cases, the issuer is usually liable.
1) https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/card-testing-surge
2) https://stripe.com/blog/the-ml-flywheel-how-we-continually-i...
3) https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/monitoring-programs#enumera...
Enumerating CVC2 with a single PAN is a different story.
That included efforts to mask PANs that were in the wrong place.
We didn’t want them in our internal logging systems, and we certainly didn’t want to leak them back to the merchants.
>I got the money back via chargeback in short time.
So as evidenced, you are protected by the fraud infrastructure. The bank ate the loss for the fraud and you were made whole. In the end, the banking system cares about fraud loss. And they are exceptionally good at finding the fraud. Making changes to the card payment system is extremely difficult, due to the vast scale of the systems, so without a very good justification that a particular change will move the needle on fraud rates, the banks will opt to not make the changes.
My experience with ebay (stolen credit card) in particular was that things were going well until e-bay sent their stack of paperwork to my bank. Then my chargeback was reversed and shortly after that even my bank account was closed.
So you're not in the clear once you get your chargeback back. That is done initially while they give the other party time to respond. I think it took 30 days or so for ebay to bury me in paperwork, get the chargeback unwound again, and their schpeel was so effective that my bank themselves then accused me of being the fraudster.
As for
> The bank ate the loss for the fraud
I'm not 100% that's true. The entire reason why the chargebackee wants to contest it is because either the chargebackee or the chargebacker is eating the loss. The bank isn't eating that loss. There is no way E-bay would have bothered contesting my chargeback and paying their white collar workers for professional time researching if the bank was just going to eat it.
Most merchants won't. But if they do, your bank isn't going to bat for you. If it looks like it's going to take them much time or effort to deal with it they're liable to just throw up their hands and let you duke it out in small claims court.
In my case they had a megacorp ready to fight it on one side, and little old me on the other. So some lady on the phone just insinuated I was a lying scammer and told me my case had been reversed. There was some sort of appeal process I tossed my hat into but it went straight to radio silence and I've not heard from them in years. I would have taken them to court but I moved cross country around the same time and it would cost me $2000 or so for airfare and hotel rooms to show up to the right courts to get $1000 in judgements.
They stole my credit card and used the bogus "me" ebay account to generate invoices (to my real address) and payments for goods from the second scammer merchant account. Then they found tracking numbers to my zip code. They bought the (fake) items from their scammer merchant account using their scammer "me" account. They used those tracking numbers to show the items were shipped and received to someone in my zip code (which is the only publicly available data from the tracking number). Of course, at no point were any of the goods "purchased" by "me" even real, but rather just ways to wash the credit card returns.
When I discovered what happened, I requested ebay refund it. Ebay claimed that since the accounts weren't actually mine (only in my name) I had no right to request a refund. So I could claim they were mine and then be ineligible for a refund because the underlying reason would be vaporized, or not claim them as mine and then be unable to ask for a refund because it's not actually my account -- a catch 22. The tracking numbers, again, since they weren't actually to me, the shipping companies refused to reveal the underlying data to me and I couldn't get any of the evidence showing it wasn't me.
At that point, I had my bank do a chargeback. Which they initially granted. I thought it was a done deal at that point.
Ebay sent all these invoices matching my name, with tracking numbers to my zip code, with my credit card being billed, etc to my bank along with a bunch of pages of banking mumbo jumbo about how the chargeback was wrong. At that point my bank turned face, called me a liar, and reinstated the charges. Not long after this, I noticed e-bay shut down the scammer account but they never refunded me the money. I assume the scammer had sucked out the money faster than e-bay could act to claw it back and when e-bay realized they'd be holding the bag they decided to dump it on the fraud victims.
Also you likely filed "merchandise/services not received" when you should have filed "unauthorized transaction". Even if you really did get the item, you don't have to pay for it if it was ordered by someone else using your card.
Also it was charged back as fraud. I had other fraud transactions that day and my bank reversed them. They were too scared to fight ebay or something.
I've learned proving a negative of "prove you didnt buy this" is pretty hard and thus fraud protection is more of a facade that only kind of works.
In the US, couldn't you just make it their problem by not paying the disputed portion of your bill? (I haven't tried this myself and don't know how hard it is to dispute a negative credit report without going to small claims court in the end.)
_If_ you notice the fraudulent charge.
Back when I was poor, I was logging into my bank and credit card accounts at least twice/week. I always knew within $20 how much money I had.
As a well-paid tech worker, I'm still checking at each paycheck (2x/month) and paying the credit card card off every time, but I'm still scanning the statements for any unexpected charges and to keep a pulse on my spending.
Fun anecdote, my wife started talking to me while I was scanning my statement once and she noticed there was a $20 charge from a business named "Your Side Chick" that she questioned in a joking way. It was from a food cart that specializes in chicken strips.
All consumers collectively pay for all the fraud, it’s just that we don’t tend to realize it as it’s not a specific line item on any of our bills, instead we all pay just a little more than we should for everything we buy.
Quite often, the merchant is unfortunately the one eating the fraud, which is creating a bit of a principal-agent problem (in that the issuing bank earns interchange on every transaction, so if they aren't liable for fraud, their default incentive would be to just approve as much as feasible and figure everything out later via chargebacks).
3DS changes that calculus quite a bit, though, and in-person payments are usually the issuing bank's liability as well.
So an enormously good anti-fraud mechanism is severely handicapped.
It’s really frustrating for most of the rest of the world.
I don’t get it, do US citizens prefer being defrauded over what is perceived as a slight inconvenience?
Even for non-victims of fraud, they still pay for the fraud as all merchants up the prices of their goods to cover fraud costs/insurance.
The size of the pie being so much bigger means the issuer’s tolerance for fraud is much larger, but it’s orthogonal to whether there’s actually more fraud. In practice credit cards fraud actually impacting customers is vanishingly rare at this point.
The numbers are even public: https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis...
If you take a look at some of the more "expensive" cards, interchange is often higher than 2%, yet issuers often pay as much only on certain categories, and flat cashback cards usually pay 1.5% (2% is relatively rare).
Compare that difference to a total interchange of 0.3% in the EU.
Do you think we are requesting to have less secure payment methods or something?
No, we don't "prefer to get defrauded", but things like this are a matter of negotiation between the card issuers and the merchants.
Not necessarily, the EU has mandated strong customer authentication by law (PSD2), and as a result has practically universal 3DSecure support.
I suspect that banks and merchants would lobby against it due the work involved. After all, they’ve already marked up their services and goods to cover the cost of fraud/insurance. So right now they don’t pay the cost of it, instead all their customers do through higher prices than they would otherwise have needed to pay.
That's not obviously true. Adding security would likely reduce fraud, but would also make transactions more difficult and time consuming, and may also make recovering from fraud more difficult and time consuming.
The costs may not justify the benefits.
They also report account closures to ChexSystems, which can make it harder to open accounts at other banks for years. Credit card issuers can drop you and ding your credit. Definitively not your fault, but still your problem, and the consequences are for you.
Back when credit cards were first starting out (which happened in the US) the US Congress passed a law- the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974- that consumers were only liable for $50 of losses as long as they reported the missing credit card within 60 days of the end of the fraudulent billing cycle. This was back when credit cards purchases were all made on paper with the machine that went "kachunk" and transferred a carbon copy of your card- everything was done completely offline. That law has not been changed, in fact, most banks completely waive the $50 and don't hold card-holders liable for anything reported (basically, annoying a customer over $50 isn't worth it to the bank). Thanks to the internet, suddenly cards got a lot easier to steal and a lot easier to exploit- but banks are still on the hook for all losses reported within 60 days of the end of the cycle. The result is that American banks have invested an enormous amount in real-time monitoring of credit card transactions, and are doing lots of stuff to monitor this- they care deeply since ultimately they are on the hook- but the consumer doesn't care. This is why US card's from the consumer perspective are so much laxer, because our banks have invested far more on the back-end because the consumer is held harmless in a way they aren't with European cards.
As a totally separate issue, the EU has regulated the amount of interchange fees that card-companies can charge, but the US has not capped them. The result is that US card-holders can get significant kickbacks for using cards (especially true for the top decile of wealth), in a way that is functionally impossible with EU issued cards that have capped interchange fees. There is a big lawsuit happening now to try and allow merchants to only accept low-fee cards (the standard VISA/MC/AMEX deal requires treating all cards equally, which gives them an incentive to push people to higher interchange cards). We will see what happens with that suit, but until then, American high-spenders can have much higher rewards on their cards, which also encourages greater use of the cards- and making them have less friction than the EU versions.
They could, but it's one of those things that really only work if everybody joins. Because 3DS is rarely used right now, a portion of merchants don't even support it, so if you start enforcing is as a single bank, your customers will start complaining their card doesn't work. The banking industry in the US is also more decentralized than in the EU, so getting everybody to join in simultaneously is hard.
The window of opportunity for 3DS has also more or less passed, the industry is moving on to the next generation of tech (wallets/tokenization), that should be both easier to use and more secure.
It’s the same reason credit card issuers are willing to pay Apple a few basis points to participate in Apple Pay: reducing friction has a non-linear impact on propensity to pay.
The actual explanation lies in the game theory of fraud prevention; see my sibling comment for details.
For card-not-present transactions (i.e. online ones) the liability is on the merchant. They however also have an incentive NOT to use 3DS because it adds real friction to purchases. I'm also not sure if all USA banks even support 3DS.
The real problem is that in the US, almost no merchants request it in my experience, despite the fact that they'd get an almost free (in terms of conversion rate dropoff) liability shift. I suppose the few US issuers that do support it have a bad enough implementation that the conversion drop is still significant.
a) It still affects their bottom-line: the issuer might still try to dispute this using a different code despite payment scheme (formal term for Visa et al.) rules, and the merchant targeted is prone for fraud (for example, airlines have been hit with this by exploiting tourists looking for cheaper tickets by offering them suspiciously cheap tickets on seemingly-trustworthy websites by fraudsters and funding them by insecure cards)
b) Misinterpretation of mandatory rules: PDS2 is applicable only for EEA customer - EEA merchant, but some extended it for whole world despite the rules literally dictating the limits
c) Soft friction for encouraging domestic card usage: because of accept-all rules by payment schemes (and no local rules that allowed merchants in a region to reject international payments), this is a way to block US cards by guise of fraud prevention (because international cards are expensive for merchants to process)
b) can probably explain this happening for EU merchants, but I've also seen this in Japan and Central America, and I think even before PSD2 in the EU.
That's what I love about the payments space: While you're absorbed in your own game of checkers, you never know if your opponent is actually playing 1d or 10d chess :)
The general idea is that if the conversion rate drop of a given security mechanism is higher than the average fraud rate, it doesn't make financial sense to deploy it.
However, at the industry-wide level, this is a pretty classical coordination problem, in that conversion rate only drops because there still is a simpler alternative around unless all merchants and banks were to enforce 3DS at the same time. If there's nothing more convenient left to move to, users will for better or worse have to learn the new, more secure thing, and conversion rates will go up again.
This is what the EU has done with mandating 3DS for many payments, but even there regulators have recognized that a 100% coverage is counterproductive, and there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
As more evidence for the same general idea: US credit cards don't have PINs, because any individual bank introducing them would see a huge drop in usage rates since customers would just use their competitor's card without a PIN instead. In other markets, all cards have PINs (whether due to regulatory invention or card network incentive), and people have just gotten used to them.
Back when it was a thing, it was quite a nightmare, where you had to register for a 3ds account, often separate from your normal online account, and keep a separate password etc. Then those iframe windows look exactly like the phishing websites, too.
Honestly, it's much ado about nothing. If the transaction is suspicious or likely fraudulent, today, you already get an SMS or an alert within bank's app on your phone. All you have to do is confirm and retry the transaction a minute later. This works for both in-person transactions, as well as remote ones, with the same flow, unlike 3ds, which only works for online shopping.
I initially thought the sms itself was phishing, but after checking online, the sms format matched and the bank webpage ensured the feedback process will not ask for any information so we proceeded to confirm that we did not purchase anything.
The bank immediately cancelled the card and shipped a new one.
My initial thought is that the bank safety system could be overreacting, but it was likely that someone was doing exactly what is described in this article and the bank detected it earlier.
I know that I am naïve :)
Back to the article: Weak point was a password that lead to another merchant not using 3D secure.
It seems from the article that bad actors have fully automated system, so (big) merchants should have handle automatic login attempts from the same ip address with different accounts. I see it from our wordfence logs that ip rotation is not so quick so it could be handled with some permanent ip blocking.
>Weak point was a password that lead to another merchant not using 3D secure
Well leaking a password shouldn't cause leaking a whole ass credit card data imo. The same data is printed on physical receipts the markets print, sometimes 4 digits, sometimes 10 digits. It's still possible to brute force from unattended physical receipts on the market.
Robinhood absolutely nails this. Best virtual credit card system I have ever used. So seamless. Can auth a card for one time use, 24 hours, or indefinite until you cancel. Such a great UI / UX
I knew it wasn't identity theft. We got a notice a week later that the charge had been reversed; we never bothered with a police report, we just cancelled the card. It had been flagged as suspicious by the bank when it was initially processed, but I'm not sure what was wrong. Perhaps one factor, like expiration date or zip code wasn't right.
I have a feeling it was stolen with some scheme like this where people just guess numbers by some algorithm.
I guess the real question here is how are they able to steal from you? Were they purchasing gift cards from a merchant with lax security?
It’s one thing to guess a number it’s another thing to get the money out of the system
That really depends on the processor; many processors do allow merchants specify your acceptance rules in quite deep detail.
There's a bit of a dichotomy in the processor market: on one side you have those that aim to make it simple for their customers and unburden them, while on the other side you have those that expose all the complexities and give intricate controls. The first side won't allow you to specify security requirements, while the second side will give you a hundred options (of course there's also processors positioning them in between). The two sides generally target different customers.
In all cases Revolut promptly reverted the charges and eventually they did a complete reissue of the cards for Japanese market (not sure how they've got around the entropy issue: maybe they've randomized the expiry dates or spread out IINs some more).
And we still don’t use public/private keys to secure transactions. Why
Credit card system was already around for decades before though
The signature scheme I implemented was thoroughly tested. Implemented from reading the Lamport and Merkel academic papers and under 1000 lines of code in total so pretty easy to audit... Nobody found an issue with it in 5 years. But the suppression was suspicious. The narrative of "Don't roll your own crypto" is suspicious... Is it really better to use the same library as hundreds of thousands of other projects? Is that really lower risk? Didn't we learn from the Axios hack that popularity doesn't provide security.
Credit and debit cards (except for 3DS and EMV) are working exactly as designed; the design just isn't very good from a security perspective.
> The data they took with the attempt of purchase is the card is still usable (not cancelled)
The payment flows should not distinguish between a nonexistent card, a cancelled card, and a valid card that needs 3D Secure. I bet the banks could even implement that without any cooperation on the part of the merchants.
Some banks let you set specific limits for recurring payments.
With a debit card you’re playing with your own money.
(I'm pathologically avoidant of credit cards, which I think are mostly pointless.)
No part of my life has been harder for not having revolving credit. I had a family, with two kids, starting in my very early 20s; I have lived on ramen wages several times since then; I've bought houses, rented cars, all that stuff. There's really been no point I can think of where I felt like having a revolving credit card would have made any of it more manageable.
I'd get points and stuff (I have a card now, it has a fuckload of points on it) but that's just an incentive to use the cards, not an intrinsic case for them.
I think most people would be much better off just using debit cards, and operating with the funds they actually have. And, again: it is in fact easy for me to say that today, but I believed the same thing when I was younger.
The crazy thing is coming to realize how little your credit score matters if you decide not to play this game. People say it will impact your ability to get a mortgage or a lease, but: not my experience!
Totally agree, but - and this is another example where the rich(er) benefit - if you actually have the money and good financial discipline you're better to put everything on your CC and pay it off in full monthly. Let the merchants finance for free for 3 weeks, plus maybe get perks like purchase protection and extended warranty.
Could be but in my personal experience, it has been the exact opposite. That said, I don't use banks. I work with credit unions exclusively. Maybe they have very different rules when it comes to handling debit card fraud.
The only time I have needed a debit card are when a place doesn't accept credit or charges a heavy markup for credit. Someone here mentioned Robinhood virtual credit card - I need to look into it, but I use a similar service and I keep my debit card locked only to unlock it for the exact window I am actually using it.
> rented cars, all that stuff. There's really been no point I can think of where I felt like having a revolving credit card would have made any of it more manageable.
I'm unaware when you last rented a car but when I rented a car last month, the company put a $500 hold on my credit card. That credit card hold went away after I returned the car in good condition a week later. I imagine, if I had used a debit card, that $500 hold would have made $500 disappear from my bank balance during that time. When my nephew rented a car, they put a $2000 hold on his credit card, I'm assuming because he's younger than 21. He certainly doesn't have $2000 to spare in his bank account.
The same credit card got me a free upgrade on the rental car, primary insurance protection during the rental period (I didn't have to buy the $40/day rental insurance) and got me 5% cashback on the full rental amount essentially undoing state taxes. The estimated cash value of these would have been ~$500 for the week. Using the debit card from my credit union would have got me exactly $0 (plus a reduced balance the whole time).
OTOH, a credit union shipped me a chipped debit card preactivated. The debit card shipped via regular USPS mail and was stolen along the way. I always keep $400 in my checking account, so the theif emptied my card at Target and 7/11. Within hours of receiving text about the charges, I called my credit union, informed them of the detail. They sent me a binder full of documents to sign. The whole time the money wasn't refunded. They took a month to review evidence and refunded me $50 (of the $400) and told me I would have to provide additional evidence that needed wet signatures, notarizied to receive the rest ($350). Every notarizied page in my jurisdiction costs $150.
> EFTA Reg E gives banks 10 days to make you whole
Interesting - any idea if this applies to credit unions too (because then you just got $350 back into my pocket!)
> I presumably still somehow owe them $40, and it wrecked my credit score.
> People say it will impact your ability to get a mortgage or a lease, but: not my experience!
Are these mortgages or a leases after you became wealthy or around the time when your credit score was wrecked? I imagine the effects of the Nordstroms credit card wore away 5-7 years (I don't recall exactly which) after the $40 was reported as late. So if more than 7 years passed between these two events, you might have a perfect FICO score now, even though you don't know it. I imagine you can just go to CreditKarma for free and use their free "dispute" charge option to permanently erase that Nordstrom black spot forever. I don't think anyone cares a multimillionaire had a forgotten $40 invoice when they were 19.
Also, for anyone above $1MM in liquid networth, most financial institutions treat the credit history as a signal and not the primary signal. I believe you have been above that by a healthy amount for a while now :)
PS: I am a HUGE fan of yours. I wrote all of the above expecting you absolutely wouldn't have a second to read a word but if you do, Thank You not only for reading (I hope atleast some of it helps you) but for your comments on HN from which I have learned a lot.
I think EFTA covers the mechanism of how debit cards work, not the institutions that issue them, but I'm not an expert. I would lean towards keeping an account for the card I use in normal transactions at one of the Big Four banks.
Uff. I perhaps can imagine what you were going through the next 10 years.
PS: I actually would like to hear your thoughts on where cybersec is headed in the age of LLMs (Mythos or not), would it be OK for me to reach out about it (unless you've written about it already)?
Maybe not harder, but one undeniable downside is that you've been paying roughly 2% more for roughly every purchase you've ever made (other than rent or mortgage payments and a few other exceptions) than you would have if you had good credit and used a credit card, due to how the US payments market is structured.
To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a reasonable state of affairs, but it's the reality.
Another issue that comes to mind are rental cars – while there's no real difference in risk protection to merchants (it's not like a credit card on file can magically make a wrecked or never-returned car reappear), many rental car agencies require them; I suspect because they use them as something of a proxy indicator of "generally responsible-enough behavior to have been issued one by an institution also exposed to risk".
In a sense it is though, because it lowers your available credit by the amount of the charge. And the fraudsters are going to try to run you right up to your credit limit, so you end up at the same problem: You now have legitimate charges being declined because the fraudsters locked up your payment card.
It's also not that hard to get two debit cards. There are credit unions with no minimum balance requirement.
The actual problem is that if it happens to any card, all the stuff configured to use that card is now failing. You have a toll tag and the company goes to charge your card for a road toll, it's a perverse unaccountable bureaucracy that has captured the government so enjoy your $50 declined payment fee. You have autopay on for several services which will naturally suspend your account if you don't pay them. That's an inconvenience for something like Netflix but for your various information services it can be a big problem even if all they do is turn it off temporarily, and an even bigger problem if the turning it off involves deleting your stuff. Likewise for things like insurance where a gap in coverage can cause you to get fined or negatively impact your future rates.
Some of that can be mitigated by chasing it all down and switching them before the charge comes, but the labor to do that is a significant cost in itself and plenty of people aren't going to recognize the need to do it until it's too late, or try to and still miss some.
But then you need to have money in the other checking account too.
Still, completely agree with your larger point. It's a big hassle having to switch cards, and the status quo (i.e., the industry being in a multi-decade transition period towards acceptable security) is sometimes the worst of both worlds:
Half of all merchants don't support automatic card updates and need to be manually fixed, while the other half do and have a chance of keeping your card alive in a fraudster's account where it's on file if your issuer is not careful.
Again maybe I’m wrong but I don’t agree they are equivalent. It sure fucking feels that way, the money isn’t threatened from my account.
I can think of plenty of times where the upsides of having a credit card were realized though.
I did have a six-figure debt to a bank and if didn’t make my payments they would take the house from my family! Much higher stakes than any credit card debt I’ve ever had.
I do have a debit card though and it’s actually not that different from a credit card. If I spend money not in my account I would get charged a $25 overdraft fee plus interest.
A quick googling says that about half of all credit card holders carry some kind of balance each month, so clearly there must be some people in my orbit not paying it off.
Under the law, credit card issuers actually have more time to deliberate before making you whole, not less.
It is nice that you know what the law is but that isn't the same as the law being followed. Also the bank was PNC, not the biggest guy ever but not a small player either.
In practice credit cards just have way better fraud protections.
Plus - like it or not - our society builds your credit based on your use of a credit card. And if you pay your balance in full every month I'm not sure why anyone would prefer paying up front (debit) vs. free financing.
I've deliberately demagnetized me and my wife's cards and we have black electrical tape over the numbers in public now.
Online purchases are the last remaining problem which would be completely solved if payments were to random keys rather then depending on everyone having the same number.
The fact that it hasn't is an interesting study in game theory and economics.