When John Brownlee, expatriate American and co-captain of the Consumerist.com ship, isn’t discussing how my building’s current lack of hot water affects my privates, he’s offering helpful advice and a platform for people who’ve been wronged by lousy customer service.
Via e-mail, he suggests this potential workaround to chip-and-PIN requirements for non-European credit card holders. He verifies that this trick works in Ireland:
I don’t know if this will work in Denmark, but what I used to do (when I lost my pin) was plug it in and just wait. After about twenty seconds of you not doing anything, a receipt is automatically printed out.
Obviously this won’t work at self-service gas stations or train ticket vending machines, but it’s worth a shot if you encounter a clerk who’s unwilling/unable/untrained to print out a swipe-and-sign receipt.
Whether you want to stand there and wait 20 seconds, doing nothing, when people are waiting behind you is a another matter.
Related:
- Rotten in Denmark: Credit cards with mandatory PIN
- We prefer Visa cards, just not yours
(image: PanDeva)
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October 6th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
I doubt this will work if you don’t have a chip on your card, which none of my US cards do.
Last few times I’ve been in the UK I had no trouble. Once they realise the card doesn’t have a chip, they just print a receipt to sign.
(I’m a brit living in the USA)
January 5th, 2007 at 9:28 am
[...] Related: – Update: How to beat the chip and PIN credit card requirement? – Rotten in Denmark: Credit cards with mandatory PIN – “We prefer Visa cards†— just not yours [...]
September 29th, 2009 at 3:10 am
I have a suggestion. Why doesn’t Visa tell its cardholders that Visa cards from the US and other places are NOT ACCEPTED in these other countries? Don’t they owe that courtesy to their customers? The chaos this has caused for me and my wife is such that I’ll be checking on other credit cards before I travel again.
October 5th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
[...] using a swipe-and-sign credit card in a country where chip-and-PIN is the norm. (Consider previous posts on chip-and-PIN challenges. I even wrote a piece for National Geographic Traveler on the issue.) [...]