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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Debit cards violate the whole "need to trust the merchant" thing. Fraud on your credit card means the bank is out the money. Fraud on your debit card means YOU are out the money until the situation is resolved.

Fraud on your credit card is nearly impossible nowadays. At least here in EU you have to have secondary (sms or bank app) confirmation for every online transaction.

The EU may be a crime-free paradise, but there's still plenty of credit card fraud in the US. And not all of it from online transactions.

In my estimation, in my country you'd have to do something like visiting a blatant phishing website to get scammed out of your money. I've heard of no cases where a physical vendor could do that. What are some typical cases in the US?

Given theNybbler's environment, the first thought would be credit card skimmers. They're not common, but urban areas finding 'modifications' to gas stations happens enough I've seen it in person. Moving to NFC/smart card transactions rather than magstripe helps, but we haven't fully migrated over, in no small part because the US chip cards kinda suck, so we still have magstripe and a lot of card issuers having to deny sketchy transactions. Most people who do it get caught pretty quick, but only after doing a lot of damage.

Less common is the old analog loophole: someone writing down (or taking a picture of) a card number, name, and CVV code.

Most online vendors also need zip, too, but if you're stealing card numbers in a diner, you can make some educated guesses about zip codes pretty easily.

I don't know how they're done, except it's not phishing. Bizarro charges appear on the card, I call the credit card company (or their fraud detection unit calls me) and it's taken care of. In one case the source was obvious because I had happened to use two different cards at the same vendor, and both got hit while no others did.

That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information. I don't see why that's a big deal. Fuck credit cards.

You don't see why making it impossible to operate as a small business online is a big deal?

That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information.

I buy stuff that isn't available on Amazon. Some of those merchants apparently haven't had the best security practices. With credit cards... that's between the issuer and the merchant, all I have to do is tell the issuer that I didn't make the charges.

I mean TBF there’s third party processing companies that do it now. Like Shop- make an account with them is mandatory to check out at some of the retailers I use that stock not available on Amazon products.

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