Bar, restaurant or shop staff that ask customers to physically hand over the card are putting them at risk of fraud.
Under the UK Cards Association’s best practice guidelines, the bank card ‘should always stay in the customer’s hand’.
However, the guidance is not well known and is regularly not followed – prompting fraud experts to call on the government to make it a compulsory rule.
Customers should refuse to pay for goods if asked to hand the card over, experts advise.
Andrew Goodwill of the Goodwill group told
the Telegraph: ‘Customers are being made vulnerable to having their card skimmed (fraudulently copied) if they hand their card over, so they should refuse when asked to do this.’
In addition, customers should not place their wallets on card readers as there is a risk of ‘card clash’ if they have more than one contactless card.
Contactless allows customers to make payments up to £30 without tapping in their PIN number.
Last year £7.75 billion was spent on contactless cards, a huge increase from £2.32 billion in 2014.
