One of the things you do not want to happen when you are sat waiting for a flight is for someone to phone you up and tell you that your credit card details have been stolen. Not the card, I hasten to add. I try to take good care of such things. But I got a call from a retailer where I had used the card to tell me that a pile of credit card payment data had been in with a bag of cash that someone had made off with. And what surprised me about this was that this data apparently contained not only my name and the card number, but also my PIN number. So much for Chip and PIN security, then.
I phoned the bank immediately and canceled the card. There do not appear to be any fraudulent transactions on it, which is just as well as the card is from a UK bank so I’d be liable if there were.
The phone call was nice ;>.
And *no* protection? ewwww — sounds like US banks might be good for something afterall ;>
As I understand it from Cheryl, the “burden of proof” rules for UK credit cards are almost exactly the opposite of American ones. In the USA, the burden of proof that the transactions are legitimate lies with the card company and the vendor. In the UK, apparently the cardholder has to prove a negative, and any charge from any vendor is assumed good otherwise.
Ewwww. *There’s* a vote for having your CC issued in the U.S.
It is actually worse than Kevin says. Simply proving that you didn’t make the purchase is not sufficient to protect yourself from liability. Card owners have to be able to prove that they took proper steps to ensure the safety of their card and security details. In most cases the mere fact that your card has been fraudulently used is counted as proof that you failed to do that, so you are liable for all charges made on it.
I try to use my US credit cards wherever possible, but with the idiotic new Chip & PIN system many UK retailers are now uncomfortable about accepting cards that don’t have it.
Ouch — the fact that your details were stolen from a store wouldn’t have been sufficient proof? You still had the card…
And FWIW, I believe American Express Blue is Chip and pin’d — that might help ;> (amusingly, the idea of a trackable chip is making that innovation get adopted rather slowly over her ;>).