Indeed, it can totally be abused by just inserting the card backwards 3 times and making the card machine think the chip is broken. Fortunately most banks now decline domestic fallback transactions, in fact I’m pretty MasterCard mandates domestic fallback transactions are declined on EU, UK and Canadian cards.
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This may have changed recently, but I’ve needed to use it at a faulty card reader (which couldn’t read the chip, the chip itself was fine) as recently as 2018 in the U.K. and it’s worked.
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Yes, this is why I roll my eyes whenever someone on here brings up not being able to use ‘click clack’ machines in relation to unembossed cards. Yes of course there may be the very occasional edge case that involves full on power cuts or the like (although of course in a lot of those cases with bricks and mortar stores H&S may mean that emergency lighting isn’t enough to keep trading anyway) and for some businesses (generally small ones) they may not have the tech, but in most situations reasonably sized retailers with integrated till systems, should there be an issue, would just, once they have the relevant authorisations, switch to a fallback.
When the card processors had a bit of a wobbly time 7 or 8 years ago, and Visa had that outage for a day or two many retailers just switched to keyed fallback, ie a generally hidden menu in their till systems that allowed them to type in the card details which were then stored until things were back online and only then were processed. Terminals defaulted to signature if I recall printing out the receipts for customers to sign to authorise the transaction.
There are so few situations these days outside of specific genres of retailers perhaps where generally if a card transaction fails there is not an alternative, be it chip and sig, swipe and sig, or a manual keyed fallback. For online retailers you’re already doing most of the keyed fallback procedure as a customer so I imagine it would work the same in effect. Of course I don’t work in the card industry so rules and procedures may well have changed, but this was certainly always what happened previously.
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Could anyone tell me, how popular is contactless and pin for larger transactions?
I’d never come across it before we went to Russia a couple of years ago, where it seemed the norm.
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Lat time I used one was December 2012 or 2013 (my stepdad was still alive). Restaurant till system went down completely and they pulled out the carbons and the machine.
The transaction appeared on my card statement a full six months later by which time I’d completely forgotten about it and was perplexed and worrying about fraud.
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It’s used in most of Europe.
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Any reason it isn’t used here?
It’s all to do with the difference between online and offline PIN, basically.
For historical reasons, we generally use offline PIN in the U.K.
The technical details are in @erincandescent’s post.
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