Re:The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery...
by mindslight on Sunday July 28, 2019 @03:09PM
(#20549278)
For quite some time, stores did retain the ability to run offline carbon-copy based credit card transactions. I've definitely seen this occur more recently than one would imagine, at least within the past decade.
I don't know if this is still a thing, as cards are no longer coming with the raised characters required to take an imprint. But perhaps the imprint is no longer necessary, and simply writing the information suffices.
There are (obviously) more avenues for fraud without online verification, but the techniques of fraudsters are no longer optimized for running physical cards either.
The more significant thing that we've lost is a cashier/manager being able to exercise some level of intelligent oversight to judge whether a transaction is likely to be fraudulent. But then again, perhaps a store being cleaned out of its entire inventory of eg Tide because of a long term power outage isn't that big of a deal either.
I don't know if this is still a thing, as cards are no longer coming with the raised characters required to take an imprint. But perhaps the imprint is no longer necessary, and simply writing the information suffices.
There are (obviously) more avenues for fraud without online verification, but the techniques of fraudsters are no longer optimized for running physical cards either.
The more significant thing that we've lost is a cashier/manager being able to exercise some level of intelligent oversight to judge whether a transaction is likely to be fraudulent. But then again, perhaps a store being cleaned out of its entire inventory of eg Tide because of a long term power outage isn't that big of a deal either.