Weird. I topped up at multiple stations, including (but not limited to) LHR, Bond St., and Waterloo, and had no issue. It rejected my card for transactions over £10 which was annoying, but it never asked me for a PIN even then. You must have encountered a different kiosk version than I did. Hopefully they're not newer ones! That would suck if all stations lost the ability to use swipe cards without going to a ticket window.

I did run into issues at the Tesco minimart near our hotel. The self service checkouts had an American-style credit card device attached. I instinctively swiped my card only to have the self-serve checkout think throw an "assistance needed" error. An employee had to come, type in a code, and then print a special signature receipt! Needless to say, I used cash every other time I went there for a soda.

That's because the under $25 exemption from signature verification doesn't apply here.

No experience with London Bridge, but I had a friend who managed to use his US card (no chip, no PIN) in both TfL (London Underground) and Virgin Trains kiosks without issue, so it sounds like an issue isolated to your card or the kiosk.

I think what's weird is that the self-serve checkouts here have signature pads but don't use them. I've seen the same systems configured in the US to require staff verification of the signature that's been digitally captured, which would make more sense than having the capture pad but still printing a paper receipt to sign.

Is it that the signature pads are on older machines, which were active during the migration to full chip-and-PIN? I certainly remember using them with my non C&P Amex a few years ago.

They're almost unusable to left-handers, too...

The ones I'm familiar with are at Sainsbury's and don't seem too old, but I haven't been here long enough to know when the migration happened, so they might be old enough. Especially if they were ordered in large quantities and rolled out more gradually as they were constructed, so they were built to a spec that was not relevant by the time many of them were installed.

They did use them at Sainsburys when the machines were first introduced, but I think they fell into disuse when the swipes on the side of the monitors were replaced by standard external Chip & PIN units, which probably couldn't interface with it.

Staff are indeed *supposed* to verify the signature, but in reality where this comes in is that if a transaction was seen to be fraudulent, the bank would "call in" the physical slips and check the signature of the fraudulent transaction against other records they have of the cardholder's signature to determine if it's correct or not.

Neil

...unless you are using one of the new proximity cards (Visa PayWave etc).

I guess that's considered less of a security risk than the magstripe because you can't really copy it (the chip won't tell you all the information you'd need to do that).

Neil

Right, although signature verification is also rather antiquated here :)