Comments on: A Prank to Remember: Do Signatures Matter?

By: Cinder

Cinder — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:39:50 +0000

I remember some friends and I always doing this years ago, we’d take pictures of the receipts to see who had the most absurd signature pass through. Some of the funniest being fortune cookie phrases that were written very clearly and covered the lower third of the receipt. Overall, we found that restaurants were the worst offenders as to not questioning, and most of the times rather than question, if they noticed it, they’d just snicker and continue about their day.

Basically, the signature panel is not for your security, it’s for the CC company’s security, and if they don’t want to spend the resources to validate when available or require their merchants to, it’s a business decision. As long as that signature considerably doesn’t match what’s on file, the CC company can be held liable for any fraudulent charges and while they’ll do a chargeback of their merchants for the charges, it becomes their problem to do so. These days, the fraudsters who use scraped/copied or stolen CCs offline are a miniscule percentage of those that’d just use/sell them online, the risk vs. reward is too high for the criminals.

By: larsalan

larsalan — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:33:58 +0000

The local market in our town has started to ask to see your ID to match you card. Though this has no relation to the credit companies perhaps that is where the real security is exercised, at the POS.

By: Mom @ Wide Open Wallet

Mom @ Wide Open Wallet — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:02:42 +0000

Even when they do ask for ID they only check to make sure the names match, no one ever looks to see if the faces match. Umm… If I stole someone’s credit card what makes you think I don’t also have their ID?

By: Kati

Kati — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:33:01 +0000

My husband signs all his receipts as Bon jovi or mickey mouse. Nobody has ever checked his signature and we’ve never gotten a call from our credit card company or our banks.

By: Lulugal11

Lulugal11 — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:40:33 +0000

The dumbest part is when you give them an unsigned card and they make you sign it in front of them to compare to the signature…all without checking the ID.

I wrote ‘ask for ID’ on my cards but no one asks for it. I would rather have someone request ID than tell me sign a blank card to match the signature I just put on a receipt. How is THAT safe?

By: Amit

Amit — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:40:28 +0000

I think the purpose of the signatures is for the Credit card accepting merchants benefit in deciding whether the person signing in the receipt is the same as the person who signed the credit card. I think its a weak security feature that relies on the fact that someone’s signature is hard to forge. If I were a merchant and I noticed signatures that don’t match, I would reject the transaction and not let you pay for the merchandise with this signature because I wouldn’t trust that you are actually the owner of the card. Just my 2 cents.