Originally Posted by
garyschmitt
Neither. It's in the statutes.
CNP is new in the US, so you're not yet going to find any strongly relevant case law. Your best source is the statutes themselves. What you're going to find is that there are no US statutes that make specific protections for fraud involving PINs. The generic language of regulation E is the same for PIN and sig.
Do you have a particular reason for disbelieving that banks have the burden of proving that signatures match? When I read a claim that banks have the burden of proving that signatures must match, I did not find that questionable despite coming from an unreliable source. I just accepted it because it's reasonable and the contrary is not, so it was not worth my time to investigate that particular point further. I prefer to only spend my time on claims that are questionable. If you find otherwise, please post what compels you to think signatures need not be shown to match.
So you're basically saying that you heard this from some "unreliable source" that you can't even name, and yet you accepted it as fact because it made sense to you. Sorry, but that's not convincing. I just did a brief search of Federal Reserve regulations, and I couldn't find anything to support it either.
To me, the opposite is more reasonable. Since a PIN is harder to forge than a signature, there will be less fraud if more people use PINs. Therefore, banks would have an incentive to encourage the use of PINs, by providing better fraud protection. It makes no sense for banks to provide better protection for using the less secure method, because then they are providing an incentive that will result in more fraud (and more cost for them).