I do have to say though, that with customer protection laws we have it has never happened to hear about a friend getting a charge back from the bank, usually you go to the seller first (or the platform if you got scammed) and you get refunded there
At least here I see online that there's the possibility to do so (even with debt cards). However, I guess that with a credit card it is going to be less annoying for you, or any way easier for you, since it's their money on the table and not yours
I'm talking about italy btw
Edit I also think that prepaid cards here are what have less protection
I have some Irish friends. And Ireland seems similar to the US when it comes to credit card usage (vs debit). I assume that is because Ireland is heavily influenced by US and UK banking habits. On other hand, Germans only use debit cards.
I checked the stats, and about 40% of purchases in Ireland are made by credit card. In the US, it is around 70%.
In the US you'll almost always get your money back if someone defrauds your debit card but you could be in for a painful time if you depend on the money in that checking account until it gets fixed.
Apple and Google Pay are just as (if not more) secure anyway for the majority of transactions, and a long tail of US restaurants, hotels, corporate card issuers, rental car agencies etc. will simply never change their legacy flows. There are just too many incumbent stakeholders.
Even if fraud victims get their money back, firstly it must be an admin headache and then merchants have to cover fraud losses/insurance costs and thus mark up all their prices to make sure they do, so everyone is subsidising the fraudsters.
I presume it’s lobbying that would/does thwart any attempts at any such regulation.
As someone outside of the US I would like to be able to largely ignore this problem as just affecting people over there, but unfortunately it spills into the rest of the world.
When I last had fraud on my card it was through an online US merchant, because, like most US online merchants, they don’t use 3D secure. If they did then blocking the transaction for me would have been as simple as pressing the “it’s fraud” option when my phone would have received a “do you want to allow this transaction of $X for Y in the US?” that my bank’s 3D secure system normally sends to me.
Hopefully Apple and Google Pay will eventually help things over there.
These reduce the level of fraud, and the banks cover the rest.
The basic stuff (online shop not delivering, going bankrupt etc) are covered for debit cards in a similar way as credit cards in other countries.
I've never had a fraudulent transaction myself, and it's over 20 years since I first had a debit card — with a chip and PIN.
I haven't ever seen illegitimate direct debit. I guess you need to have an actual business to issue direct debit orders and bank will show you the door and freeze your money if you start doing funny things. I guess.
Probably the dreadful R word has something to do with it, go figure.
On cards we also have limits and the only time I saw something happening was after being unfortunate enough to pass through ~~the ghet~~ the glorious capital of our continental Empire, majestic city of Brussels. That time the bank tried their best to call me.
Chargeback always seemed strange to me and never needed it. Fraud should be reported and handled at the root, not by making digital transfers into some magic disappearing money.
But I did have someone fraudulently making direct debit transfers from my bank account. My bank cleaned that up within three business days
It's not much of an issue within the EU area. The banks tend to offer insurance products for people who want to cover that risk.
Single account sounds more like a boomer thing.
Credit cards being more consumer friendly than bank transfers is usually an artifact of the concrete implementation, not the abstract concept. In many EU/SEPA countries, returning a direct debit is much easier than a chargeback in the US, for example. In some countries, people even consider credit cards as less secure because filing a chargeback takes marginally longer with most banks (and requires a letter as opposed to a single click in online banking).
If the digital euro is to succeed, it'll of course have to compete with cards on the usability side as well.
In the US, overdraft is generally considered a very bad thing (almost worse than the idea of credit to Germans!) and a failure of the accountholder to “balance their (figurative, today) checkbook”, and the idea of an overdraft limit as a line of credit with a defined interest rate does not exist at all.
I'm with you. While I'm no fan of the risk involved with missing a CC payment, there's a mountain of difference between credit and debit when it comes to fraud. It's literally you trying to get your money back (debit) versus some giant corporation trying to get _its_ money back (credit).
Somebody somehow stole my card credentials (online i think) and managed to get money out of my debit account through some obscure way without 2FA. The money disappeared but transactions showed up as “uncleared” and after few days i had money back. My bank said that i have to wait for the transactions to clear before they can start the transaction dispute because now it's in network hands.
People with stable jobs and good credit qualify for no-fee credit cards with rewards / cashback. As a consumer you benefit financially from having a credit card. Those elsewhere in the thread worried about "debt" - you just set to auto-withdrawl the entire balance of the card every month from your bank account. Now you have free money. I can't think of a reason not to take advantage of this system in some way.
But people with unstable jobs and poor credit help subsidize these "higher-end" credit cards when they pay high interest rates on their because they missed payments or hold a balance over multiple months. For those people credit cards could help with monthly cashflow issues but are essentially a scam and not much better than payday loans.
Yet another system that American consumers are kind of forced to participate in that's a sort of tragedy of the commons (high-reward cards wouldn't exist without the exploitation of other people not savvy enough to avoid high interest and fees)
Exactly, it is just their latest marketing move to have people accept it.
I was in a meeting at the ECB 6 years ago, the digital euro was high priority and we were supposed to see the first pilot 5 years ago.
The project is actually older and I saw schematic of the system and screenshot and the management interface 6 years ago. It was developed by a German company.
I am not sure why we are not using it right now... it can either be:
- the urgency, like upcoming financial collapse, disappeared,
- the bank lobbied so hard they killed the previous design,
- the EU is just insanely incompetent.
Credit card rails are expensive legacy rails, that part of the stack is the target to disrupt in this context. In the context of the digital euro, you can think of it as a demand deposit account backed by the central bank (as most fiat deposit accounts are in some way) that is portable between banks, like you’d move a US investment account that can hold securities between brokers with ACATS at the clearinghouse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415854 (recent subthread with some related context)
Global instant payment system map: https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/PYMNTS-Rea... [pdf]
That's a massive oversimplification, and doesn't even address the OP's point that directly challenges this.
Lot of errors in your post.
Not to mention the fact that you confuse Mastercard and Visa for "credit card rails" further underscores this.
Your comment history shows a decidedly anti EU sentiment, including against EU sovereignty (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515118, for example), make of that what you will.
> How come the EU is making a "digital sovereignty" push? Why are only EU people allowed to compete for EU services? Are there no evil people in the EU?
I like tech that improves efficiency (disintermediating unnecessary US commercial payment processors) and decouples from proven threat actors and nation state aggressors, that is my interest on this topic, ymmv.
One big difference is that in the U.S. cardholders are largely protected from credit card fraud (not debit card fraud), so the card vendors have to take the risk and so have robust anti-fraud measures (both before and after payment). Largely it is the merchants who have to prove that there was no fraud. Whereas in Europe the burden of evidence (not proof) is with the cardholder.
You get nervous about giving your card to a waiter because you’re in a foreign place with a nonsense payment system worst than most developing countries and it’s not something you’re ever asked to do anywhere else.
In the US, you simply have no choice if you want to eat in a restaurant, so people are used to it. I'd expect total skimming rates to be higher in the US, since magnetic stripe transactions have been phased out in effectively all other countries. People don't care because they don't directly pay for the resulting fraud out of pocket. As a society, of course everybody still pays for it.
> Largely it is the merchants who have to prove that there was no fraud
No, in-store, it's the issuing bank that's liable, even in the US (unless the card is PIN-preferring, which is usually only true for foreign cards).
There's also a large difference between counties. In the Nordics its ubiquitous, I haven't carried or needed cash for almost 20 years. Meanwhile Germany has barely started to use cards.