It' S A Part Of The Agreement With The Credit Card Companies

I know a lot of people don' t like to sign the back of their credit cards.

The trouble is that stores are not supposed to accept credit cards that have not been signed by the customer. They worry that it gives a sample of their signature for thieves to imitate in the even their card is stolen. It's a part of the agreement with the credit card companies. This can lead to the rather humorous story of clerks insisting you sign it, then they accept the card from you without a fuss. If you don' t sign the back of your credit card, you can occasionally run into a store clerk who will make a fuss about it. But if you think about it, this also means you aren' t protecting your card in the event of a theft. Many clerks will not bother to check ID even in that circumstance.

The thief's signature could easily be accepted as your own. But this does lead me to my own favorite way of protecting a credit card. Those rare times that a clerk actually checks the card for a signature, there is an increased chance they will ask for an ID. I simply write" SEE ID" on the back, along with my signature. Not a great one still. A few stores ask for ID as a matter of course.

Probably less than half of the clerks that look at the back of my card actually ask for an ID. I worked for one such company while I was in college. Most were apparently kept in cars, although people showed a strong tendency to get lost on the way back to the store. The excuses for not having an ID were always quite interesting. But then there was the case of the man who claimed to be shopping with his wife's card. Yes, upon calling in the card after the rejection, the card was stolen. No, the woman he was shopping with was not his wife.

Frankly, signing or not signing your card does very little to protect it from abuse. The best things you can do to protect your card is to be careful about it and report thefts quickly. There are too many places where neither the signature nor the identification of the card user( or abuser) will be checked. But I do like having the" See ID" request on my cards to make things just a little harder for a thief at those rare places that do check.