Is Your POS Equipment Out of Date?

I was recently reading an article written by Ellen Roseman who wrote an article for the Toronto Star called ‘Protect Your Card Numbers‘ and it spark some really interesting conversations about out of date point-of-sale equipment in the Canadian Merchant Account industry.

Ellen talks about how she received a receipt from a business with her full credit card numbers on the bill which is now against Visa’s merchant account policies. This happened to Ellen early April 2007 and the new policy took effect April 1st 2007. What a lot folks did not know is that even though the new policies had arrived that many merchants still have out date equipment & software that still prints out the consumers full credit card number.

Well, it’s now Feb 2009 and there are still many, many Canadian businesses using this same old out of date equipment which is violates Visa and now also Mastercards policies.

This is a major issue and reason why is this important is because if the receipt gets into the wrong hands, identity thieves can run up big bills in your name.

No signature is required for online and telephone purchases. And, creeping into the market, chain stores won’t need signatures for transactions below $25 or $35. Just look at Tim Hortons. (Still can’t believe they only offer MC and not Visa & Debit – kinda 1/3 card processing, but there is not enough room about this in this post).

So who’s problem is this…?

I have a sneaky suspicion it will soon fall upon the merchants and small business owners. Just like a “Chargeback” it’s the merchants burden of proof that any disputed transaction is a real and legit transaction.

SIDENOTE: I’d be real curious to know what the percentage of merchant’s winning potential chargebacks versus not wining these disputes. I bet that merchants lose more than they win. I have nothing to back that up, but after being involved in the merchant account industry for about five years now I have noticed a trend that the credit card processing companies usually have their “butts” covered and if someone is going to pay more it’s usually the merchant/small biz owner.

So, that being said. A warning to all Canadian small business owners. Check your receipts to make sure they are blocking out part of the credit card number to protect your customers from potential fraud. If you notice that your POS terminal is still showing all the numbers then contact your payment processing provider and ask about an upgrade on new point-of-sale equipment or even better – call me! I’d more than happy to upgrade your equipment, I might even be able to lower your costs at the same time.