You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.
Yeah I agree. Not only do I hand off my card, literally everyone I know does so. None have ever had problems. I'm not saying that such fraud never happens, because it obviously does happen. But I don't think it's so overwhelmingly common as is being claimed here.
In my lifetime, I had my card details stolen once (in Washington DC). It was an American Express. They caught it immediately and shipped me a new card before I even noticed.
It was basically “we caught some shady shit, here is your new card number, which will be delivered today”. It is one of the reasons I like Amex. They are johnny-on-the-spot when they get a sniff of fraud.
This source[0] is hardly unbiased, so take this with a heavy dose of "citation needed", but it claims:
> 62 million Americans had fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards last year alone, with unauthorized purchases exceeding $6.2 billion annually.
That jives with the number of unauthorized transactions I've had on my cards. 62/260 million adults = about a quarter of adults each year. On average I probably average a fraudulent transaction in a quarter of the years.
I had my corporate card get cloned by the Wendys at Seatac airport, about 10 years ago. Do you consider that to be a sketchy restaurant? Why are you victim blaming?
I had not used the card in several weeks. Coffee and a breakfast sandwich at Wendys was the only purchase I made that day. ~4 hours later my card was declined when checking in to my hotel in LA. Called their security department, they wanted to know whether I had authorized a $4000 purchase at a Best Buy in Dallas.
I don't know how to define sketchy. I believe you. I just don't know how to account for the difference in experience.
> In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant
I don't think I've ever seen anyone use a phone to pay at a restaurant. I think I generally see 95%+ pay with cards, the same way that "was" common. The rest is cash. Maybe I'm just not paying attention? I don't know.
"everything I see online" is probably disproportionately outliers. I use a credit card hundreds of times a year in many places around the world and at least cursorily keep my eye on charges in my statements and fraudulent charges are rare--like maybe every few years at most.
I've been using my credit card at restaurants for 30 years. I've used it probably 5000 times, and I've only had the number stolen once (from a grocery store).
Where are these low-trust areas of the US? I want to visit and check it out.