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On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 7:26 PM, Kevin Peat wrote: > Well the customer ultimately pays. So even if you don't use cards you still > pay for card fraud every time you buy something. This is true, of course, but then you should also mention that the customer benefits from the fact that electronic payments tend to be cheaper for both banks and shops. I think it's a net win for both customers and businesses. > Card transactions should > never have been extended to the phone and then online without a reliable > method of authentication. It isn't the retailer's fault that they cannot > verify their customer's identity. It isn't, but some could do a lot more. > This is something the card issuers should > have fixed years ago As I tried to argue earlier in this thread, authentication is hard. Very hard. Actually, 100% authentication is impossible. I do think you should see the fact that some transactions will have to be cancelled as part of the deal. It's the same with, say, a letting agent: some people will not be able to pay the rent and you'll end up losing money on them. You'll just have to perform ample checks to make sure that it only happens to a small percentage of your customers. Note that a lot of dodgy transactions happen in cash, because they don't leave an audit trail. If someone steals my credit card tomorrow, I'm likely to be compensated for most if not all losses I suffer as a consequence, because I can trace the payments to the business the card was used. If someone steals cash from my wallet, it's gone. (Yes, from a privacy point of view, audit trails aren't always a good thing. That's a separate discussion.) Part of my day job is to tell people how scary things are with online banking and what risks you run. But I'm not sure if these risks aren't actually lower in than an the 'offline' world. Martijn. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq