[ecspike]

Chip + Signature depends on the venue which makes it really annoying.

Went to a new city, one place out of the four I visited required a signature, the rest were fine with tap to pay/chip+Pin. Some places are fine until some arbitrary limit, etc. The place that made me sign? The purchases were $5-$6.

[rswail]

Chip + Signature is a dumb USian thing because merchants didn't want to change their readers to have a secure PIN pad.

Contactless has different floor limits than Contact (chip). For example, in AU, the limit for contactless without PIN is ~AUD100. In the UK, I believe its GBP30.

If you tap for a payment over that limit, the reader will ask for the PIN.

The primary difference is that if a customer uses contactless/contact and PIN, then the risk of the transaction is passed to the network/issuer, instead of the merchant.

[oakesm9]

The UK has a limit of £100 for contactless cards, with a requirement to insert and enter your PIN after a few successive taps. Apple Pay and Google pay technically don’t have the PIN requirement as they’re authenticated and technically don’t have a limit, but in practice most shops still have a £100 limit.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Chip + Signature is a dumb USian thing because merchants didn't want to change their readers to have a secure PIN pad

Americans don't want to punch in a PIN. We have more cards per capita and are habituated to the convenience of a swipe. (Unlike much to the world, our fraud risk sits almost entirely on the merchant side.)

Contactless had no hope with a PIN. Merchants catered to that despite higher cost and risk.

[CaptainZapp]

Funnily enough my card doesn't work contactless with PIN. I need to shove it into the chip reader to make it work.

Which, thinking about it, is exactly how it should be.

The closed circuit of chip reader and pin was always touted as super secure. Then suddenly, you could pay contactless with most cards regardless of the amount and enter the PIN. Too me this always seemed to subvert the "super secure" chip & PIN authentication.

It's a small "hardship", really. On small amounts contactless works just dandy and having to present the physical card to the chip reader for larger amounts makes me actually feel better.

[feygeubdjvf]

> Chip + Signature is a dumb USian thing because merchants didn't want to change their readers to have a secure PIN pad.

there's a write up on this that i cannot find. the reason was actually that some criminal organization with ties to lots of political pacs had their money cow being fraud (or money laundering) on gas stations. so they forced gas stations to never update the pins for this very specific reason.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>If you tap for a payment over that limit, the reader will ask for the PIN.

This is country-dependent; while this is the case in Spain, it's not the case in France, where the terminal will insist the card be inserted and the PIN entered.