I live in Indonesia, which teaches you tons about credit cards and how easy they are to get fraudulent with. But at least here they don’t allow you to swan past security with riding lawn-mowers you haven’t paid for. From the Sacramento Bee, a cautionary tale about the self-checkout lane in supermarkets where you swipe your credit card, wave a scanner over your goodies, and leave.
Speed and convenience, the paper says, have made the most basic fraud deterrent — checking IDs — nearly obsolete. Crooks know this, police say, and are abusing the technology with frequency. Sacramento County sheriff’s detectives estimate they receive 140 cases of credit card fraud each month.
Another interesting snippet: Most credit card companies and retailers don’t reveal their fraud numbers because if consumers knew how much fraud really occurs, they might lose faith in the credit system and the technology that accompanies it, said Stuart Taylor, vice president of VeriFone, the leading manufacturer of point-of-sale terminals. The company reports that payment systems fraud is growing at an alarming rate in many countries, including the United States.