Credit Cards/Chip and Pin/ATM withdrawls

Yes.

Those are sufficiently unlikely to be an acceptable risk. If it happens, I am certain that it will become known in a fairly short time and I'll get the money back without a huge quibble. Same as ATM's that have been fitted with false fronts and skimmers etc.

That type of risk is therefore the bank's risk, not mine.

Not at all. If you read any newspaper consumer supplement you will find it mostly describes events that must have happened to thousands of people. The newspaper's finance correspondent only gets to hear about a very few of these cases - the ones where the victims have take trouble to write to her about them. Moreover, if she gets a thousand such letters, she'll still only publish one of them.

You seem to be making my case for me :)

And for every person like her who insists on her rights, there'll be a hundred who shrug their shoulders and give up.

You seem to be over-estimating the resale value of expensive jewellery. Far from getting "a *very* good percentage of the price you paid", you would be lucky to get as much as twenty percent with a completely above-board transaction. It would be only a fraction of that for something dishonestly obtained.

A while back another poster said that the card has your PIN stored in an area that is inaccessible to the outside world. In use, the POS passes to the card the entered PIN, the card's CPU accesses its internal storage and either confirms or denies a match. After 3 incorrect attempts, the card will set an internal "disable" flag and refuse to acknowlege further queries.

The chip is sealed and physically difficult to access, and in any case would require *very* expensive equipment to be able to extract the contents of an area of its internal Flash memory even if it was possible to expose the silicon without damaging it.

OK, so we have different views on this.

I am happy to run the chance that my chip and sig card will be stolen covertly and cost the bank money as a result.

I prefer that to the much less likely possibility that my chip and PIN card will get me targetted by someone who will want to get cash from ATMs, persuading me to part with my PIN as necessary.

If I am wrong and some of the present credit card thieves don't react to PINs by getting more violent, then so be it.

The other thread on carjacking is, I think, relevant. Car have become more difficult to steal but those that wish to steal them haven't all simply done something else - some have changed tactics to get the car owner to bypass the enhanced security for them, using violence if necessary. There will be fatalities as a result of this.

Incidently, they could easily verify that it was a chip and sig by presenting it at any shop. No need to go as far as an ATM to verify that I was telling the truth.

That's changing. More recent Amex cards are chip and pin. They changed around September or thereabouts.

John.

The usual problem of proving a negative. I can't ever prove I didn't divulge the PIN. I do stand a chance of showing a particular signature cannot be mine. If "my signature" appears to come from, say, Bermuda, I just show I wasn't there. If my PIN is used there, how do I show it was not with my connivance, unwitting or otherwise? The point being that /I/ am the only person who can provide a legitimate version of my signature. A PIN is just a number.

I can but admire your confidence in the banks :-)

Cynic posted

I don't think that's good enough. The vast majority of people are not aware of their rights. Chip and pin makes it easier for the banks to bamboozle them.

I thought that any card that worked in an ATM allowed cashback BICBW.

I overhear, in the queue (nosy cow...I know) customers being offered cashback.

I always pay by credit card (chip and sig ;) ) and never get asked.

Very rarely I see a customer try to conceal PIN entry. I do sometimes think of following one of the others and saying,"BTW, your PIN is 1963"

- but have been too scared of the possibile reaction. No one likes a smart ass. It may, of course, that I don't appear to be a threat - but I doubt that they change their behaviour just because of that.

I have no idea if any of my credit cards work in an ATM, even the one with a PIN. So, if it ever was, I hope the AI system might notice.

One particular bank, whose credit card I use when it has to be a mastercard, must have a very sensitive system as they ring after what feels like every time I use it. I make sure to thank them and tell them how much I appreciate their caution.

Bitstring , from the wonderful person Cynic said

But credit cards with no PIN =don't= work in ATMs, that's the whole point.

No, it is generally only debit cards that they will give cashback on.

Mainly, I think, because they are charged less on debit card transactions than they are on credit card transactions.

This would be the same banks that at the height of the "phantom withdrawal" times in the early 1990's refused to refund me when £80 came out of a cash machine in Portsmouth and £100 from a machine in Norwich with less than 10 minutes between the two.

Oh and I had paid, and signed with the card for a rail ticket in Sheffield thirty minutes later and could prove it.

They never refunded the money. I just closed the overdraft and settled it less the £180.

Your faith in the average high street bank is touching, if a little misplaced.

Mainly because credit cards are not eligable for cash back... debit cards are...

Axel

No, it would be 1/10000 + 1/9999 + 1/9998 = something reasonably secure. But I don't like it. It scares me.

Not quite right.

Chance of /failing/ in all 3 attempts is (9999/10000) * (9998/9999) * (9997/9998) = 9997/10000 (assuming you're not dumb enough to try the same failed number twice)

so chance of succeeding given 3 goes is 3 in 10000 exactly.

A friend of mine bought a simple gold chain necklace for circa £500. He took it for valuation about 6 months later and was offered circa £450 then and there if he wanted to sell it. The fact that the item was obtained dishonestly would not affect the price - how could it? You are thinking of stolen items sold to a "fence" because they would be known to have been stolen. In this case the jewelry would be sold as legitimate.