A friend of my brother’s has recently had his credit card stolen and used to buy a cheap laptop computer worth around HK$5K. The bank is demanding the card owner to pay up.
Let’s face it, signatures are easy to forge. I remember having read on the Internet quite some time ago about not signing your credit card, and here is a more recent article.
It so happened that one of my credit cards is about to expire and I have just received a new one. So I put in the box “PLS CHECK ID”.
I went to the local Commercial Press bookshop last night and bought about HK$250 worth of books using the new card. The salesperson just completed the transaction. She didn’t raise any questions or ask for ID. Maybe because it’s a small sum.
The biggest advantage of not signing your credit card is that, if someone steals your card and go shopping with it, the signatures on those sales slips are bound to be nothing like your signature on the credit card company’s file, so you have pretty good ground for disclaiming any liability. The shop handling the transaction will be blamed for not verifying the signature.
This is of course only good for dealing w/ the small-time opportunistic credit card thieves. Big time credit card fraud gangs grab the info from your credit card and make their own fake cards then go shopping crazy somewhere in Europe, for which the only defence is to stick to your standard VISA/Master and refuse to upgrade to a Gold/Platinum being the favourite prey.