wrote:

On 2 Feb, 18:10, "Simon Finnigan" wrote:
"Clifford Frisby" wrote in message

...

Anyway, they refused to take a signature in lieu of PIN, and I refused
to let them take the card for swiping.

This has been the situation in PC World, and a number of other shops, for
quite some time. Â*It`s never bothered me because I use a chip&signature
card.

When Chip-and-PIN first appeared, Sainsbury's used to do something
behind the scenes with the card and you entered the PIN on the pad. I
never saw whether they swiped the card or had a slave reader. It was
all too new to be suspicious of what was going on. Nowadays you insert
the card in the reader yourself. I think there was an intermediate
period where it was done either way according to the whim of the
cashier, phase of the moon, ...?


I recall that Tesco, up until a few years ago, insisted on you letting the
cashier swipe the card through a magstripe slot (presumably with a chip
reader at the bottom end) built into the cashier's console. You then were
expected to enter your PIN on a typical chip'n'pin keypad.

The difference in contrast to PC World, was that if you complained, Tesco
always accepted a signature instead. Also, in PC World, the device they put
the card into was just some free-standing monolith on the desk.

ISTR that there was a batch of card readers that had been got at at
the factory in China and sent off your details to cloners. Perhaps PC
World et al got hit by them and the two-part reader makes it more
difficult for the crooks.

Maybe, and that might be just hunky-dory from PC Worlds POV. From the
cardholders perspective, having to insert only about one-third of the card
into a device provides confidence that the magstripe won't have been read,
whereas watching it being swiped through a magstripe reader doesn't.


Chris