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?
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This is the real answer.
Credit cards are you borrowing money from the bank to make a purchase. The store pays visa a 3% fee every time this is done. Debit cards were originally made to function like paying with a check. Because they were not borrowing money the bank charged either no fee or 1% fee to the store each time. Visa didn’t want their business disrupted so they started issuing debit cards but because they were functioning as a check taking money directly from the payers bank account they could only charge 1% not 3%. Visa of course wanted the three percent so they said you could use that debit card as a credit card by skipping the pin. Then the customer would technically be borrowing money from Visa and immediately paying it off from their bank. The customer wouldn’t notice a difference but the store would have to pay that higher fee to visa. That’s why visa heavily advertised and ran contests incentivizing skipping the pin even though it was less secure and ultimately raised the price of goods. The stores weren’t allowed to object because of they did, than visa would take away their ability to process credit and debit cards which would destroy their business. All they could do is raise the prices accordingly. Basically visa raised the prices on everything you buy by 3% and kept all that money. Pretty damn good scam.
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