[QUOTE=Bilbo1967;1923349]So do you still have to sign something for a credit card in the US?It depends. Generally speaking, yes. The latest fad is that for small transactions (under $25 or $50, depending on the store and their bank), you don't. But that's only been the last few years. Note that it's still the same old magnetic strip system, though.
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Originally Posted by Bilbo1967
I remember watching American programs years ago and not understanding how kids seemed to be using their parents credit cards. Since pin numbers came in, I'd always assumed that the US had had that first and that was how it worked.
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Debit cards have always used PINs, but credit cards no. Kids need to be added to the list of people authorised to sign, and in many states is kind of a gray area (because minors can't sign contracts), but as a practical matter, it's not an issue because if the parents dispute a transaction on that basis, they open the kid up for criminal prosecution.
Adding a PIN to the credit card system would be, from a techincal standpoint, fairly simple, because most of the processing equipment for credit cards also handles debits. But the banks seem to want to go to chip-and-pin systems instead, in the theory that it's more secure than PIN (though the technology that's out there really isn't - the system used in Europe has been broken nearly as thoroughly as most 802.11 encryption). And that requires hardware upgrades at the merchant level, and that's millions of merchants at hundreds or thousands of dollars per cash register.