Originally Posted by
NewbieUtah
So if you want to use the U.S. Discover Card in China and get the cashback , the best way is to use some kind of machine to read the strip of the card and write it into some other Chinese bank card. Although technically it seems to be illegal to counterfeit a card but nobody really care, as least for Chinese authorities or banks, since you copy your own card and use your own money. And then you can go around shopping with your new card.
I'm not sure that you realize what is encoded on the strip. I used to work in a risk control department years ago and at that time they were implementing algorithms embedded into the strip. I think it was in track 2 iirc. We could tell if the card (counterfeit) at that time had all the information encoded unique to that card. In the cases I was dealing with customers having cards counterfeited out of Kowloon, Hong Kong. We could see all the data (in most cases) transmitted from track 1 and/or track 2. We had a high rate of assumption of counterfeits based on the lack of information in those tracks.
My point is that someone reviews this info when a program kicks out these factors and you would probably be getting a lot of calls from the fraud dept. Yeah, nobody in China really seems to care about counterfeits. I've seen a 3-track encoder for sale at some mom-and-pop ghetto electronics store in China. But the banks will certainly take notice.