[ELI5] Why we can just skip the PIN when using our cards?

Question

You know when it gets to the PIN screen, sometimes it’ll say, “Press cancel/enter to continue” and you can just… bypass the PIN. Doesn’t that just defeat the purpose of the PIN?

In: 247

Answer 1

That causes the card to be processed as a credit card instead of a debit card. There’s differences between the two types such as the processing fees, the procedure to dispute a charge, etc.