I used to get £50 per card 20 years ago at asda petrol station always instructed via terminal serving hundreds of customers a week I’d pick up £50 every other month or so…great when your a student and it’s 
o’clock…the threats were always the best yeah I’m going to give the card back and miss out on £50
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The threats are the best until the fraudster punches you in the face or pulls out a knife… especially 20 years ago when surveillance wasn’t that omnipresent as now and you could get away with that pretty easily.
Personally I wouldn’t risk it - there is no benefit to me (even 50£ doesn’t outweigh the risk of the above, plus the inconvenience to other customers of a potential confrontation) and I am protected anyway as I would be taking only online transactions and no magstripe. If other idiots are happy to take offline magstripe then it is not my job to protect them by taking that card away. 
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Agreed, £50 is so not worth the risk…
Not accepting magstripe is a violation of your merchant agreement to honour all valid cards. Additionally, what’s the risk to you? Liability shift is on the least secure party. If the bank isn’t using EMV, that’s their loss.
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Haven’t had a need to accept physical cards so I’m not familiar with the process but what I meant is I would be refusing anything that would put the liability on me. If I can accept magstripe without liability I’ll be happy to do so.
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Ah, okay. Yes, lots of confusion on that. Though I’ll note, even if the liability was on you, you still have to accept it per honour all cards.
Though we all know how well the merchant agreement is actually enforced… (not very, unfortunately).
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Since you have way more experience than I do in terms of payments, would you know which scenarios would involve an insecure payment method (as in offline magstripe or even the carbon copy imprinter nonsense) while leaving the liability to the merchant?
I don’t know all of them by any means, especially those older things.I know a common one is Internet/Web without 3-D Secure. They really should have done this like EMV (least secure party is liable)…
Also, this one is the subject of contention on here… with some claiming demanding 3-D Secure is fine because the liability is on them if they don’t. That isn’t how I interpret the Mastercard Rules, which, to my non-lawyer eyes plainly say ‘Honor All Cards’ as simple as that. That said, Mastercard has, to my knowledge, not taken enforcement action on this point. Of course, they also never took enforcement action against merchants with surcharges, etc…
P.S. if anyone doubts me on the EMV liability shift not putting merchants accepting magstripe at risk in the UK: Homepage | UK Finance
There’s a UK specific source 
Misunderstanding of this liability shift has been a huge problem for people with magstripe cards, and remember there was about a 10 (2005-2015) year gap between the first countries like the UK and the last like the US to switch. ‘NO MAGSTRIPE’ signs plagued US travellers, and now even plague Americans in America who are customers of some smaller banks and credit unions that haven’t switched (yes, the dreaded ‘NO MAGSTRIPE’ is starting to show up in America now).
Yeah it was. Forgot about that as well as my pin, HA!
Interesting. I worked phone retail and we had high amounts of fraud but never had any POS message or instruction to ever take anyone’s card… Which is interesting given that we were selling high value items. This thread is the first I’ve heard of it!
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Possibly this is less of an issue in the UK as EMV is everywhere and most transactions happen online, thus no need to actually take a card out of circulation as it’ll be online-declined pretty much everywhere. Would be a different situation in the US as such a card will still work at any offline magstripe terminal thus the need to take it away and destroy it.
Where are you going to find one of those in the US? Maybe on an airline (though these are going online more often) or deep in a national park. Square etc allow this at festivals and stuff at a merchant’s own risk too, but overall… Extremely rare.
I’d really like some “evidence” to be provided to the customer - even if it’s just a receipt from the card machine saying “In accordance to instructions from XXX bank, this retailer has been asked to retain card ending XXX on date YYY. Please contact XXX bank”.
Why? Well, the “evil me” thinks “Hmm, I know that card supports contactless and very rarely asks for PIN checks, so I’ll say their bank told me to seize it and go spending contactless. Okay, I’ll only be able to get re-sellable spirits and stuff for under £30, but many purchases=profit”.
When a shop took my RBS card and cut it in half I was not given any receipt or paperwork to say they had taken it or why they had taken it. Funny thing though was their acquirer was NatWest, so one part of a bank group making a mistake with a card from the same group. I got an appology but no compensation for the hassle they caused.
It should be cut in half in front of you, at an angle to cut through the chip ideally.
That said, you can block the card almost instantly. Report a card stolen immediately if this ever happens and explain what happened. Also, ‘PIN checks’ should be a thing of the past. I know a few banks still do them. But online contactless with modern fraud detection analytics should render such ridiculously unfriendly hassles a relic of the past.
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