The latest issue of Reader's Digest has a nice article on Credit Card fraud. The article starts off like this :
It's a pleasant Friday afternoon at a sprawling department store in central Mumbai. But I'm uneasy. It's a crime to use another person's credit card, and here I am, a man, using a woman's card with her photograph on it.
I hand my four purchases to the cashier who looks bored as he holds a scanner over their bar-coded price tags. He then takes the credit card I proffer him and swipes it through an electronic data capture machine or EDC, which okays the card in seconds and whirs out two transaction slips.
Avoiding any eye contact with the cashier, I sign the top slip and hand both back. He returns the card, a bill for Rs.4185 and my copy of the slip. Not once did he look at the card, ler alone the woman's photo on it. Not did he compare my signature on the slips to the one on the card.
Heh. That so happens all the time. No one verifies the stuff on the card.
It's a pleasant Friday afternoon at a sprawling department store in central Mumbai. But I'm uneasy. It's a crime to use another person's credit card, and here I am, a man, using a woman's card with her photograph on it.
I hand my four purchases to the cashier who looks bored as he holds a scanner over their bar-coded price tags. He then takes the credit card I proffer him and swipes it through an electronic data capture machine or EDC, which okays the card in seconds and whirs out two transaction slips.
Avoiding any eye contact with the cashier, I sign the top slip and hand both back. He returns the card, a bill for Rs.4185 and my copy of the slip. Not once did he look at the card, ler alone the woman's photo on it. Not did he compare my signature on the slips to the one on the card.
Heh. That so happens all the time. No one verifies the stuff on the card.
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Comments
And no, the article goes onto say that Banks here demand the money from you!! And there are cases where people have ended up paying for goods brought off a stolen card!!
I have lost thousand bux ! :-(
-nerdy
PS: I had time to write this comment ! :-(
Clever ones caught these people...but they got caught only 5 out of 20 times. And everywhere they got caught, the shop had prior experience of being swindled this way..and hence they were careful.
There was a time long long before the "swipe the card and punch the amount" method,...
I always wanted to operate those old machines. ... insert the bank slip, place the card ,... and then use all ur might to transfer the cc impression on to the paper ....Phew .. all said and done ... five mins down the drain... and a goldspot down the food drain ...
after doing all this exercise .. he used to have time to Veri-fy the signatures ...
ofcourse the number of guys[and gals] using credit cards was a tiny fraction.
Nowadays, with almost everyone owning 2 - 3 credit cards ... and an average transaction time reduced to 5- 8 secs ... to minimise the maximum waiting time ..
i guess .. we need to give them some "credit."
Seems like ages ago...it would have been what? 8 years ago?
maybe ..
but a couple of years ago, when i had been to gangtok ... had the rare oppurtunity to see those machines ...
theer are places where those oldies are still used .. .