Well, hate to bring out my ice pick in the middle of a ballon-vendor's
convention, but I'm really having trouble buying this "reduce fraud"
thing. Credit card issuers are not interested in the least in reducing
fraud if it means they have to give away a cent to do it.
The one measure that would do far more than anything else to reduce
fraud would be to put a picture of the owner on the card. Credit card
companies have refused for years to do this because it would a) be
expensive, and b) mean you can't just mail out a card to some random
address to which you've previously mailed a solicitation.
You'll also note that the primary source of security being offered
with this phone thing--typing in a PIN--is technology that's already
available to the credit card companies anyway. Most places for several
years now have hardware that accepts debit cards, and thus has a PIN
keypad. Yet you'll notice that the credit card issuers don't care to
use this technology.
There are plenty of other rather insecure things that issuers do (sending
out those damn cheques, sending out the solicitations themselves for
that matter) as well. And why not? In fact, the merchants are the ones
who bear the brunt of the loss to fraud. (Credit card companies work
really, really hard to avoid giving a chargeback to both the customer
and the merchant. One or the other is fine, but not both, because then
they're stuck with the loss.)
Bascially, fraud is good if someone else pays for it, because that's
just a bit more money for the credit card company. So reducing fraud is
no good if you have to pay very much at all to do it. I can't see how
they're going to make enough off of this to make it worthwhile paying
someone a cut of a *lot* of transactions.
I can't really see why the consumer would care, either. Since I (as the
consumer) am using a credit card I already have, paying the same bill,
and so on, why would I want to muck about with a phone (which is of
course not even going to work sometimes) when I can just swipe a piece
of plastic and be done with it?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Tue Jan 15 04:58:21 2002