"The risk of getting caught if you decided to try to commit credit card fraud was high enough that it was (mostly) an effective deterrent."
Unfortunately the risk isn't as high as the author intended. There are still many credit card launder groups that take advantage of in-person fake card transactions. The margin is so high that they would often purchase over a few thousand worth of items at Wal-mart or such (mostly gift cards) at a single time and the lack of care from cashiers just doesn't help with the deterrent factor.
Aside from the big boss, even the busboys would try to snatch up items for themselves from the store aside from the gift cards to give back to the big boss. This creates a healthy enough ecosystem that each part of the chain will have enough motivation to not cause the group to fall apart, because the margin is just too high.
The credit card itself builds too much on trust and is fundamentally broken. Trust is a rare quality in human and it is just not present in a criminal's eyes. Of course, the trust allows a credit card to be used simply without much additional overhead. If one day we collectively deem credit cards to be insecure enough maybe we'll consider trading off the easy usability for a more secure measure such as presenting your id when using credit card. Or perhaps we should all just wait for the future where we each have biometric chips embedded in us to scan at a credit card machine.
Unfortunately the risk isn't as high as the author intended. There are still many credit card launder groups that take advantage of in-person fake card transactions. The margin is so high that they would often purchase over a few thousand worth of items at Wal-mart or such (mostly gift cards) at a single time and the lack of care from cashiers just doesn't help with the deterrent factor.
Aside from the big boss, even the busboys would try to snatch up items for themselves from the store aside from the gift cards to give back to the big boss. This creates a healthy enough ecosystem that each part of the chain will have enough motivation to not cause the group to fall apart, because the margin is just too high.
The credit card itself builds too much on trust and is fundamentally broken. Trust is a rare quality in human and it is just not present in a criminal's eyes. Of course, the trust allows a credit card to be used simply without much additional overhead. If one day we collectively deem credit cards to be insecure enough maybe we'll consider trading off the easy usability for a more secure measure such as presenting your id when using credit card. Or perhaps we should all just wait for the future where we each have biometric chips embedded in us to scan at a credit card machine.