In the dark old days before Apple Pay, where it was common in America to hand your credit/debit card to some rando at a restaurant and have them disappear with it for a few minutes, about once a year my bank would call me to ask if I'd been using my card in some far-off locale:
"Hi! Are you in Tijuana?"
"Not since 1993. Why? What's up?"
"So you didn't just try to buy gasoline at a PEMEX there?"
"Nope, I'm in San Francisco as speak."
"OK, thanks! We'll get a new card out in the mail to you."
That's a pretty low bar for identity theft, but I think it's defensible.
I’ve been using debit and credit cards since long before the ‘dark old days’ ended (1992? 1993? Long before debit cards were a common thing), and I still hand my card to anyone who needs it to do their job. I’ve had identity theft happen a grand total of never.
Anecdotes are worthless.
I've been using a debit card since the Dubya administration and I have never had someone use my card after I ate at a restaurant. I assume you live in a big metro area?
In Texas about a decade ago there was a criminal enterprise out of Houston that was putting swimmers on gas station pumps all over the state. Little towns, big towns, country gas stations. My now wife got hit that way.
Swimming at a gas station pump would be uncomfortably lethal.
I am, but some of these events were when I was traveling through smaller Midwest towns. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to it.
In any case, it hasn't happened again since I started using tap to pay whenever possible.
You must have been going to some very shady restaurants. I still hand off my credit card to a rando. I did it today. I did it last weekend. I've never had this problem.
I had my corporate card get cloned by the Wendys at Seatac airport, about 10 years ago. Do you consider that to be a sketchy restaurant? Why are you victim blaming?
I had not used the card in several weeks. Coffee and a breakfast sandwich at Wendys was the only purchase I made that day. ~4 hours later my card was declined when checking in to my hotel in LA. Called their security department, they wanted to know whether I had authorized a $4000 purchase at a Best Buy in Dallas.
Yeah I agree. Not only do I hand off my card, literally everyone I know does so. None have ever had problems. I'm not saying that such fraud never happens, because it obviously does happen. But I don't think it's so overwhelmingly common as is being claimed here.
This source[0] is hardly unbiased, so take this with a heavy dose of "citation needed", but it claims:
> 62 million Americans had fraudulent charges on their credit or debit cards last year alone, with unauthorized purchases exceeding $6.2 billion annually.
However, that jibes with other numbers I've seen.
https://www.security.org/digital-safety/credit-card-fraud-re...
This exact thing happened to me once at the hotel bar in the Santa Clara Convention Center / Hyatt Regency Santa Clara.
Not especially, I don't think. It's incredibly common according to everything I see online.
I guess I'm just lucky.