Find the best credit card offers online.Visa credit cards recently announced that they will be expanding their no signature required for credit card transactions below $25 to 98% of its 800 retailer categories, in their efforts to find ways to help retailers or stores facilitate their payment transactions.
Fantastic Sams a hair salon located in Bradenton, Florida is thrilled with the recent decision of the credit card issuer and expects transactions to be completed much faster with the new program in place. The salon only has three hair stylists and gets a huge volume of clients who comes and goes daily. The new program fits into their business model as they are understaffed and they don’t like to make their customers wait unnecessarily for receipts or proofs of payment.
MasterCard has a similar program that has been in operations since 1991 and has grown over the years to include stores or shops such as convenience stores and groceries, where fast transactions are essential. In their program, cardholders are not required to sign receipts for purchases ranging from $15 to $50, depending on the merchant type. Receipts are also optional in such cases.
Not everyone though looks favourably to such programs. Linda Foley of Identity Theft Resource Center said that no signature schemes can be a cause of serious concern to consumers like her. When people are not required to sign receipts, a store staff will have no way to verify the signature behind a credit card. She added that thieves go after small purchases, which can be compounded quite easily.
Jeffrey Sklar, who manages the fraud department of NY accounting firm Sklar, Heyman & Co., says that the people who are at most risk with such programs are those who lost their wallets or credit cards. Signatures provide additional security to users such that if they don’t match with ones on the back of credit cards, store personnel can ask for additional identification. In addition, consumers typically don’t check every entry on their credit card statements and would not bother examining small purchases such as the ones made in convenience stores or gas stations. What’s scary is that many fraud transactions start out in small amounts.
If in case a consumer does report a suspicious entry in his card statement that is not substantial in cost, banks would normally not waste their time investigating such cases, which makes the practice of scrutinizing small amounts futile and counterproductive.
Advocates of no signature campaigns counter that banks put such programs in place based on the risks involved. They believe that thieves would really not bother using credit cards for small amounts, since many purchase items that they can resell later. MasterCard officials added that credit card fraud incidents have not increased since their no signature program was launched in 2003, and they see the campaign as safe and beneficial for both consumers and retailers.
