US card fraud rate is significantly higher than in the EU. In 2015 it was about 0.042% in the EU, vs 0.1388% for the US. The 2021 rates for the EU fell to ~0.028%.

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.

It's seem completely crazy to me to give your card to a waiter.

Yes, because handing over your card to a stranger is considered a fairly crazy thing to do in most countries other than the US, as cards require PIN entry for most transactions (which actually does meaningfully prevent in-person card fraud).

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).

Taking a card away from the table is weird for us because it's not what we do here so it becomes suspicious. Even so skimming is much less of a problem since chip and pin were introduced. Nobody I know has had any issues with fraud. We also require 2fa for online purchases.

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.