Law on credit card receipts is wrong
The comments by Liz Weston in Money Talk (“Digging out of a credit card trap,” Dec. 2) may reflect the law, but they reinforce how badly out of sync our legislators tend to be.
The question was whether it is OK for merchants to print the full credit card number on receipts or whether they are required to truncate the numbers, showing only the last four digits. The answer was that federal law requires merchants to mask all but the last four digits only on the customer’s receipt, not on the merchant’s copy.
As a former merchant, I can tell you that this makes no sense. In a business establishment, there are untold numbers of people who have access to that receipt, and the numbers on it. This means that there are also untold opportunities for identity theft or credit card abuse.
Michael D. Neben
Irvine
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