Is there a rule that a merchant must identify themself when making a charge
"Here's an excerpt from VISA's Card Acceptance Guidelines for Visa Merchants (PDF)  The merchant name is the single most important factor in cardholder   recognition of transactions. Therefore, it is critical that the   merchant name, while reflecting the merchant’s “Doing Business As”   (DBA) name, also be clearly identifiable to the cardholder. This can   minimize copy requests resulting from unrecognizable merchant   descriptors. Merchant applications typically list the merchant name as the merchant   DBA. This may differ from the legal name (which can represent the   corporate owner or parent company), and may differ from the owner’s   name which, for sole proprietorships, may reflect the business owner. I think that the key statement above is ""Therefore, it is critical that the merchant name [...] be clearly identifiable to the cardholder."" Since this merchant was not clearly identifiable to the cardholder, they are in breach of a critical point in these guidelines. This is from VISA, but I would assume that all other major credit cards would have similar guidelines for their merchants. However keep in mind that these are ""guidelines"", and not (necessarily) rules." In some case the customer wants the name to be cryptic or misleading. They don't want to advertise the true nature of the business they visited. In other cases the transaction may be reported through another business. A few years ago the local PTA was having a silent auction as a fundraiser. A local business allowed the PTA to use their credit card reader to process transactions over a certain amount. Of course when the credit card statement arrived it looked like you spent $500 at the florist. I have seen PayPal listed when donating to some small charities.  I have noted another case where confusion can occur. I used a debit card to buy a soda from a vending machine: the name and location were the name of the vending machine company and the location of their main office. It didn't say  soda machine city A. It said Joe's vending company city B. In most cases the business and the credit card company want to make it easy to identify the transactions to keep the cost of research and charge backs to a minimum. Obviously, the credit card's administators know who this charge was submitted by. Contact them, tell them that you don't recognize the charge, and ask them to tell you who it was from. If they can't or won't, tell them you suspect fraud and want it charged back, then wait to see who contacts you to complain that the payment was cancelled. Note that you should charge back  any charge you firmly believe is an error, if attempts to resolve it with the company aren't working. Also note that if you really ghink this is fraud, you should contact your bank and ask them to issue a new card number. Standard procedures exist. Use them when appropriate.
Credit card companies organize types of businesses into different categories. (They charge different types of businesses different fees.) When a business first sets up their credit card processing merchant account, they need to specify the category.  Here is a list of categories that Visa uses. Grocery stores and supermarkets are category number 5411. Other types of businesses, such as the examples you provided in your question, have a different category number. American Express simply looks at the merchant category code for each of your transactions and only gives you rewards for the ones in the grocery store category. It's all automated. They likely don't have a list of every grocery store in the US, and even if they did, they would probably not provide it to the public, for proprietary reasons. If you are in doubt about whether or not a particular store is in the grocery category, you'll just have to charge it to your card and see what happens. Often, the category of transaction will be shown for each transaction on your credit card's website. I don't have much to add other than your signature is not required to process a charge.  Signatures are kept on file for validity in the event you dispute a charge.  Your signature isn't held in some magical database with signature recognition software.  If you draw an shark in the signature section of a receipt that won't stop the charge from processing.  In fact, many merchants don't even bother requiring the signature below a certain threshold. There are loads of behind the scenes processing improvements offered by the EMV chip; namely prevention of card number skimming and duplication via encrypted transaction signing.  While requiring a PIN adds an additional layer of security, simply processing via chip dramatically improves the network fraud prevention tools in a manner that is almost completely transparent to the user. To your point, if your wallet is lost and an imposer holds your physical card there is no anti-fraud improvement.  At any rate, you have zero fraud liability in the US. "The statement is (in laymans terms - if not in real terms) correct. Most credit cards (I know this to be true for VISA and Mastercard) have dispute processes and will do a chargeback on the merchant - ie take the money back from the supplier in cases where you don't receive the goods or other fraud - Particularly if they can't produce a signature and (for transactions which are not face-to-face) a tracking number. Your exact rights will vary by bank, but mostly they need to follow the guidelines set by the Credit Card company - and you do need to be a bit careful - if you received goods which were fake or a dispute arises you may be up for shipping the goods back to the merchant - and you have a limited - but reasonable time - in which to make the dispute. (The statement ""the money is the banks"" is not technically true, there is no money involved until you pay it, only credit [ they are very different, but almost no-one knows that, I communicated with a Minister of Finance on the topic], but this is quite technical and as a layman not something you need to worry about here)" "Working retail myself, I do not accept an unsigned card without verification.  If I received one I would ask for ID and verify the photo with the Name. I would also let the buyer know it was unsigned and remind them that anyone finding it can sign it and use the card without issue. Putting on the back of the card ""SEE ID"" is the way buyers have protected themselves from thieves as long as people are actually looking at the cards.  How does this protect?  1- a lost card cant be signed by a complete stranger as there is already writing on the card.  2- It provides a photo identification for use. I know with today's technology that this is going away and fewer people are actually checking but shame on those companies who handle the cards and don't look. Obviously this process does not apply to self checks, but safety protocols there require a pin of some form that only the authorized user should know." "Yes and No.  There's always a ""fee"".  The difference in credit vs debit usually determines how much that fee is and how it's paid.  Each vendor who accepts the major credit card is under contract to pay for equipment and meet certain standards.  The same is true for debt card transactions.  How much the ""fee"" is can vary based on the contract the vendor has with MasterCard/Visa/AMEX.  But in general most debt transactions go back to the bank who distributed the card." There are different ways of credit card purchase authorizations. if some choose less secure method it's their problem. Merchants are charged back if a stolen card is used. I'm not sure about the laws in specific states. However it's part of their merchant agreement that they can not charge a fee for a customer paying with credit card. It's also against merchant agreements to require a minimum purchase to use a credit card, although this is less commonly enforced. Apparently (http://fso.cpasitesolutions.com/premium/le/06_le_ic/fg/fg-merchants.html) merchants can offer a cash discount. Offering payment by credit card, though practically a requirement in todays retail environment, is a privilege for the merchant. It's a way of making buying convenient for the customer. As a result, penalizing the customer in any way is not just against their agreement, but rather disingenuous as well. edit: here's a bit more information about what they can and can't do. Amex prohibits discrimination, so if a merchant can't do something to a Visa/MC customer they can't do it to an Amex customer either. http://fso.cpasitesolutions.com/premium/le/06_le_ic/fg/fg-merchants.html "In this answer, I won't elaborate on the possibilities of fraud (or pure human error), because something can always go wrong. I will, however, explain why I think you should always keep receipts. When the (monthly or so) time comes to pay your credit card bill, your credit card company sends you a list of transactions. That list has two primary purposes, both of which I would consider equally important: While for the former item, a receipt is not necessary (though it certainly does not hurt showing the receipt along with the bill to provide further proof that the payment was indeed connected to that bill), the latter point does require you to store the receipts so you can check, item-by-item, whether each of the sums is correct (and matched with a receipt at all). So, unless you can actually memorize all the credit card transactions you did throughout the past one or two months, the receipts are the most convenient way of keeping that information until the bill arrives. Yes, your credit card company probably has some safeguards in place to reveal fraud, which might kick in in time (the criteria are mostly heuristical, it seems, with credit cards or legitimate transactions here getting blocked every now and then simply because some travelling of the actual owner was misinterpreted as theft). However, it is your money, it is your responsibility to discover any issues with the bill, just as you would check the monthly transaction list from your bank account line by line. Ultimately, that is why you sign the vendor copy of the receipt when buying something offline; if you discover an issue in your list of transactions, you have to notify your credit card company that you dispute one of the charges, and then the charging vendor has to show that they have your signature for the respective transaction. So, to summarize: Do keep your receipts, use them to check the list of transactions before paying your credit card bill. EDIT: The receipt often cannot be replaced with the bill from the vendor. The bill is useful for seeing how the sum charged by the respective vendor was created, but in turn, such bills often do not contain any payment information, or (when payment was concluded before the bill was printed, as sometimes happens in pre-paid scenarios such as hotel booking) nondescript remarks such as ""- PAYMENT RECEIVED -"", without any further indication of which one of your credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, stored value cards, or cash was used." "It's anonymous/automated. They don't know who you are, just that customer x1a bought y. If your name isnt given to employees ""your"" privacy isnt being volated because the dont know its ""you.""  I imagine the government justifies their intrusions on our digital privacy the same way." The signature actually harks back to the days before every business checked every transaction online. When charge cards were introduced modems didn't exist. Nowadays, stolen credit cards are usually reported within 24 hours and the card won't work. Businesses that face low fraud rates don't bother checking. They probably figure that a certain percentage of charges get charged back because the cardholder claims that they didn't make them, and the credit card company usually just passes the cost on to the merchant, so it's really the merchant who should be worried about fraud since he or she is going to pay for it.  The real question for the merchant is whether checking signatures actually reduces charge backs.  If the credit card is stolen, how hard would it be for thieves to practice the signature on the card a few times until they can reproduce it well enough to fool someone? Businesses that face high fraud rates are often more careful. In New York City, try buying some Nikes on 34th Street, and you'll get your signature checked, your driver's license checked, and they'll call up your 5th grade social studies teacher. "Understood. But based on the OP, it's not categorically clear what they were refusing.   If they refused to quote the balance and/or refused to take a phone payment that was otherwise in keeping with the cardholder agreement (i.e., the cardmember called the correct number for phone payments and balance-checking, etc), then yeah, they were not only being unreasonable, but also violating the contract.   What I read as ambiguous is whether the cardholder was specifically asking for the *payoff* balance/amount, and whether they were following process for phone-payments and balance-checking, etc.   IOW, it's not necessarily ""illegal"" and might not even be unreasonable for the customer-service number to have different departments for balance-checking and phone-payments versus card-cancellation. It's not falsifiably clear from the OP that the cardholder was not asking the person on the other end of the phone for categorical statements of fact that they were obligated to make.   I'm not accusing anyone of lying or saying that the CC company was acting reasonably, I'm just saying that language such as **""They do not provide mid-cycle payoff quotes""** is not evidence that they were doing any kind of funny-business." I gather that, while it is not illegal for a merchant to pass their payment card processing fees on to their customers directly in the form of a surcharge, doing so is a violation of their merchant agreements with the payment card processor (at least for Visa/MC). It's not - surcharging has been permissible since 2013, as a result of a class action lawsuit against Visa and MC. It's still prohibited by state law in 9 states.  If you're in one of those 9 states, you can contact your state Attorney General to report it. If you're not, you can check to see if the business is complying with the rules set forth by the card brands (which include signage at the point of sale, a separate line item for the surcharge on the receipt, a surcharge that doesn't exceed 4% of the transaction, etc.) and if they're in violation, contact the card company. However, some of those rules seem to matter to the card companies more than others, and it's entirely possible they won't do anything. In which case, there's nothing you can really do. The truth is that Visa does not require a merchant to enter the cvv number before authorizing a transaction.  The only information that is really needed is the credit card number and expiration date. They specifically state on their website this waiver does not apply to this incident.  It only applies to the use of their credit monitoring product.  [link to website](https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/).    So basically you can't have identify fraud then blame it on their credit monitoring tool.  In this case, Equifax is guilty of several things, not related to this product, so they can't just sneak in a clause like this. Is this for the US? Or does it apply here in the UK in a general sense?  Obviously I think we are using different terms, but this is just a general run down of the different business types really right?  I'm wondering if the use of a name thing matters here in the UK or not. I'm happy to trade under my actual name, but would prefer a name for the business that is separate to my own name.