Originally Posted by
richarddd
It seems most of the serious problems that Americans have involve unattended kiosks - train tickets, gas stations, etc. Will chip and signature help in those cases?
Originally Posted by
sdsearch
How? Isn't 90% of the problems that American experience overseas with unatteneded koisks and such? (Merchants you can talk to face to face can usually take the swipe, though many seem not know it until they try.) How does putting a chip&signature card into a kiosk that expects a PIN as the security verification work? Are you told to put in a specific "generic" PIN for that card type?
If it doesn't work in unattended kiosks, then I'm not sure what good it is for consumers. Unattended kiosks, from what I understand, are the main problem, not a tangential problem. (Perhaps because there are many more ways to work around a seeming unacceptance of swipe when there's a human involved, but no ways to work around it other than chip&pin AFAIK when there's no human in sight.)
It really depends on how the the kiosks are set up. If they only support PIN authentication, then Chip and Signature cards will not work. However you must also keep in mind that many European banks issue Chip and Signature cards to some customers as well, and many people in Asian countries only have Chip and Signature cards, and I have not heard of either of those groups of people having issues. The main thing those kiosks are looking for is the chip, not necessarily the PIN