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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Yes, but it’s always a matter of security vs convenience. People realized that the convenience of being fast on payments under a certain threshold is better than the low risk of having some money stolen by a thief that takes your card and goes spending around. Some people have both of the conveniences if they’re paying using their phone since they use other methods other than a PIN to “unlock” the payment, usually a fingerprint ID or a face ID.
I’ve never been asked for a pin for a credit card. What is OP asking??
Is this a European thing?
Having worked retail I can answer this one. I’d you put in your PIN it runs it as a debit. If you hit the red button to skip you run it as credit.
How about finger prints or facial recognition?
At least in Spain the law was that you need to identify yourself as someone that is authorized to use the card.
One way is to present your ID and verify that you are the card’s name holder.
The other one is by entering the pin to validate the transaction. Only the people authorized to use the card should know the PIN.
So if you present the ID that should be enough so there has to be a way to waver the entering of the PIN.
That was ar least how i was taught 20 years ago when worked retail during uni.
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 Debit cards were originally made to function like paying with a check.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.
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.
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