Everyone in America is perfectly aware that the "dispute" button exists.
Trouble is, the lag time between hitting the button and getting your money back can be weeks. With a credit card you are out zero money.
Nope, it's as soon as the bank is aware. In your rush to correct me, you failed to understand that there are simply better customers protection here which make a product such as a credit card mostly useless.
I'm almost tempted to test it right now but I am pretty sure I did this once and it took under 1 day
Ok now I asked a chatbot for how this is regulated. The answer was wrong as expected but it happened to mention the applicable regulation which can be looked up at gesezte-im-internet.de
§ 675u BGB - requires immediate credit for unauthorized card payments
§ 675x BGB - chargeback in 10 days for direct debit transactions (lastschrift)
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__675x.html
I guess this is just germany but I vagely remember a payment processor eu directive that this is probably implementing (PSD)
-> Yes. It is article 73 and 76 of PSD
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
So this holds EU wide for all banks.
This was literally 15 mins of googling (well duckduck ing) on the train.
Now there still could be counterveiling evidence and ianal etc, so use grain of salt. Gotta get off now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_is_nine-tenths_of_t...
What matters are the legal and contractual rights and obligations you have against the card issuer. In the US, these are historically different for credit cards (Fed Regulation Z) and debit cards (Regulation E), but since it's now effectively the same two schemes running it all and imposing their additional liability protections (largely motivated by considerations of brand perception, which would suffer if the same logo sometimes confers weaker protections).
The main practical difference nowadays is that in the case of debit cards, you're out your own money for a few days, while with credit cards, the only thing that temporarily suffers is your open-to-buy/line of credit.
Right, and this is GGP's main point
The risk to a debit card user in the US is higher because the money you need to pay your rent or mortgage may temporarily disappear due to fraud, and may take longer to resolve than your deadline with your landlord. When using a credit card, that risk is not on you.
I think the risk is higher in the US compared to Europe because Europe was way faster to roll out chip stuff, whereas in the US it's still somewhat common to have to use the mag stripe.