> There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never actually been through this and are just apeing what other people say online.
I've been through it personally and with friends.
My experience was basically yours. I am a relatively highly paid professional with a large amount of assets with my bank. I get pretty good service, even at my giant national retail bank. I call, make a demand, they tend to just do it without too many questions.
My more low income friends have also gone through it, and I've assisted with them since they were panic'ing. Their experience is absolutely nothing like mine. Every single one spent days to weeks being sandbagged by sometimes the same bank I dealt with on my issue.
Your experience will very greatly depending on how "valuable" of a customer your bank feels you are to them.
> U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.
On paper, sure. In practice, no. Funds frozen during an "investigation" matter a whole lot more when it's your money vs. a made up credit limit number that wasn't real to begin with.
I have a friend that got a call/notification that her card was being used suspiciously. It may not have been from the bank. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but then very shortly after, someone else got her newly issued debit card and then used it at an atm in her area. The bank didn't believe that she wasn't involved. And despite filing a police report and giving them all the information that she could, she was out 2.5 grand, which was a big deal for her. BofA if anyone is wondering.
They got her new card and activated it, so they set the pin. I wish I had details because it seemed very sophisticated. So she couldn't have been the only one hit by the scam.
Yikes... That's an interesting angle. Not sure how you would intercept both, I would assume/hope they would be sent separately preferably using different methods
The key with debit cards is the incentive misalignment. With credit, it’s the bank that loses out, not you. With debit, it’s you. Until the consequences are equaled by legislation, there’s no world where they get equal treatment by the bank
it's transaction fraud insurance. like any insurance, you pay a small amount regularly, and in return get protection in case of large sporadic loss.
points are just premiums: some insurance consumers are a greater risk, and so pay more.
any convenience features are built on top of the insurance product: _because_ all players are covered, _therefore_ i can make online purchases. _since_ (i have a justified expectation that) i am not liable for fraudulent use of my account number, _therefore_ i can read it to a customer service rep over the phone.
we can of course debate whether 2% is a good price for this coverage! but there must be some price paid here -- if the insurance broker doesn't collect it, the scammers will. this, after all, is the real tragedy.
My friend, as a rule of thumb, every additional player im a transaction takes a cut.
So assuming the rest is all the same, you just paid exactly what you would've paid with a debit card. Because the merchant had to raise prices to accommodate the fee. And that's with the credit card company not taking a cut and we all know that's not true.
The merchant chose to not offer a lower debit card / cash price because the merchant bets that people will pay a higher price if they use credit cards, so the merchant incentivizes credit card usage by asking for the same price for credit card and non credit card payment.
There are merchants that do not do this, such as Target, which charges 5% to use a credit card. Insurers/tutors/daycares/schools/healthcare providers/contractors/gas stations/restaurants/governments/utilities are also known to frequently charge more for credit card payments.
Any seller can choose to offer a lower price for debit card / ACH / Zelle payments if they want to.
Even ignoring the cut taken by the credit card issuer, why do I have to go through some random card to get a 2% discount, when prices could just be 2% lower across the board by default?
To add on to that: if someone fraudulently uses your credit card, it's the issuer's money that's now missing and they need to get it back. If someone fraudulently uses your debit card, it's your money that's now missing that you need to get back. Hopefully things don't start overdrawing your account in the meantime.
Yes we'll open a dispute. Yes we'll give you a credit immediately. But then we just take the sellers word for it that they're trying to make it right and charge you anyway.
This is my one singular experience with a dispute but that's with a big bank getting almost all of my transactions over the course of years....
A very big percentage of credit card expenses in the US come from cards with rewards programs, so you get money/gift cards/travel discounts in exchange for using the credit card instead of the debit card. A lot of this is funded from much higher interchange fees: It's ultimately the merchant you buy from funding most of the rewards. Since those very high fees are nowadays illegal in the EU, European credit cards cannot have this kind of generosity, and incentives are very different.
How does this work when using a US credit card in the EU? I assume the merchant still pays the lower interchange fee, so are the banks just betting that customers won’t do a large proportion of spending abroad?
They might, and it's good they do, but they're not legally required to in quite the same way that they are with credit cards. If someone pulls $10k out of your BofA account, they're completely within their rights to do basically nothing about it.
I had a friend who had their checking wiped out by debit card fraud. Their bank issued them a provisional credit of $150. So nice. Too bad rent was due in two days and was considerably more than $150.
Slowly over the next three months the charges were slowly reversed. In the end the bank didn't reverse all of them, but my friend did get most of her money back.
I've had this happen to me twice in about 25 years. Neither bank made me wait weeks.
The most recent one (with a giant megabank) issued a provisional credit in under an hour.
There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who have never actually been through this and are just apeing what other people say online.
U.S. banks largely give debit cards the same protections as credit cards for at least the last 15 years.