Debit card fraud drains your checking account, creating a short-term emergency: legitimate transactions are then returned for insufficient funds or create overdrafts. Both carry punitive fees. The bank has to restore your funds eventually, but in the meantime, there could be an eviction notice on the door.

You generally share your bank account number with a small number of trusted parties: employer, landlord, creditors, utilities, tax man, etc. Exposure is low. When you start swiping a debit card around town, you hand out the same level of access to every merchant you buy anything from, and whomever might be skimming their terminals or stealing their databases.

Credit card fraud adds to your balance, but you don't have to pay it while the investigation is ongoing. Typically they revoke your card number and mail you a new one. During that time, you live off of a different credit card your debit card. Critical payments go straight to your bank account and are unaffected. When the investigation is over, the charges disappear. At no point are you deprived of actual money, you merely have an inflated short-term debt.

I agree, but these seem like operational concerns that you'd anticipate for each individual account in today's world of broken payment networks. It might even be nicer to have bank account disabled with a few hundred in it, than temporarily lose a credit card with a high limit that you funnel larger payments through for the rewards. You can't prevent this, so my comment was focused on how much you could actually lose after the dust settled.

Good point about a check bouncing though. I would think your bank should waive any charges (after all, you weren't defrauded nor did you write a bad check), but the recipient might complain about their bank's fee (for essentially a rejected ACH transaction, but I digress). Although speaking of checks, readily handing out a printed withdrawal key seems like a poor idea if your goal is avoiding surprises!

> You generally share your bank account number with a small number of trusted parties

Every second website I buy stuff at has my IBAN.

Looks like it's a vety different situation here in Europe.

Sadly, too many US websites don't allow this, I ended up having to get a CC (and pay for it!) just to deal with US bullshit websites demanding a CC. That CC cost me more in fees than I've ever kost in debit transactions.

Credit card is the same old debit card with additional "automatic loan issuance on insufficient funds" service. With debit, your risk is limited to whatever is in the account associated with the card. With credit it is the same risk plus your credit.

Your funds are not really at risk of permanent loss in either case. The difference is what happens in the short term. Also it’s not true at all that debit card losses are limited to your balance. Banks will approve transactions that put you well into negative balance and charge overdraft fees.

Each location you use a card increases the risk of the number getting copied. So using a debit card exposes tons of possible people with entry points into your account.

So once you assume whatever you use will get stolen, you determine what dealing with a stolen card number will be like. With debit cards it's your own cash locked up in a transaction dispute. With credit cards its the credit card companies credit balance and you have no money locked up.