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Comment by ShiftPayments | Hacker News Reader

The card actually is inactive until you activate it once it arrives

but if someone intercepts your mail, then they know your address and could possibly know your phone number. How secure is the activation process?

Why dont you send the card and PIN out separately like a bank?

> but if someone intercepts your mail, then they know your address and could possibly know your phone number. How secure is the activation process

Every "normal" credit and debit card I've received in the mail has used this same procedure -- call a number on a removable sticker stuck to the card to activate it where the only verification is the phone number you're calling from (and caller ID is easily faked).

How is this any worse than how every other card activates?

And how do you propose they get around the mail interception problem? Have a courier deliver it to you and place it in your hand?

I was wondering why they think their system is more secure than the traditional method of issuing cards and PINs through the post.

Half of the cards I remember activating were based on the originating phone number (which I think you could still possibly spoof) which should have been tied to your account when you signed up. If the phone you're calling from isn't the same one on your account, there's likely some additional information you provide or maybe go through a CS rep to finish activation. Unfortunately, like you say, there are also many bank's systems who ignore or simply don't care about the call ID number.

As for interception, I guess you could require a signature for delivery but that's a pita. You just have to weigh the risks in that situation and the convenience of not requiring a signature obviously outweighs the risks of theft.

EDIT: grammar

Holy shit, that’s horrible.

Where I am, PIN and Card arrive in different letters, and the Card letter is only sent once you confirmed via your online banking interface (which uses 2FA) that you received the PIN letter. And you need to confirm online in your banking interface to have received the card to be able to use it.

For credit cards in the US you virtually never use a PIN. Debit cards only

That's changing as of this month. Most banks have already issued new chip cards, which require a PIN. If a merchant is still using the old swipe and sign system, now they'll be liable for any fraudulent transactions if the customer has a chip card.

The system in the US is not chip-and-PIN, it's chip-and-signature.

All of the new chip cards in the US I've read about are signature only. It was decided that the US consumer would dislike the added complication of needing to use PIN.

I'd like a chip card that requires a PIN (and that is accepted widely in the US) because such a card would make unauthorized charges less likely after the card is lost or stolen, but was not able to find one.

I have a US chip card where I've set a PIN for transaction purposes, so it's not signature only, but it'll still accept both. That said, all of the chip card readers that I've used (few and far between still...) seem to have been configured for signature only, so I haven't been prompted for my PIN yet.

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that my "signature only" was inaccurate.

Incorrect. The new cards are chip and signature. No pin involved.

Debit cards are chip and pin now, granted

Well, even then.

Require the customer to verify that he/she received the card in their online banking interface.

Mark it as invalid/stolen/whatever before that.

This may seem foreign to most people here, but there's still a TON of people who don't do online banking or have an account setup/bookmarked for all their financial institutions online sites.

Well, in those cases you can go to the next branch.

Which is itself horrendous on a different axis.

How so? It means you need access to the online account, to the 2FA device, and to both letters to abuse the card.

If the attacker already has access to the online banking account, then he/she can do much worse things anyway.

Different axis aka not security. The security is much better. But it's slow and inconvenient.

How is it inconvenient? It’s not like you get a new card every day.

And it only delays the process by 2 days. At maximum.

Rare inconvenience may be more easily tolerated, but it is no less inconvenient.

The fact that you can even say "well it's only 2 days delay" seems insane to me.

I opened an account at Metro Bank (in London), in a branch. They verified my id, then printed a debit card — this took about 10 minutes — and let me set its initial PIN in the bank.

I don't know if this is now normal in the UK. The previous time I opened an account in-branch was 2004, when the chip card arrived by post a few days later, with the PIN in a separate letter.

Similar situation here in Germany – but some banks, as I mentioned, require you to verify online that you received the letters, if you enabled this security feature.

In fact, I’ll go next friday to the bank to get a new debit card, as my existing one stopped working a few months ago.

Metro Bank are a newcomer to the market who've focused heavily on streamlining their customer enrolment because of that. I don't think other banks offer this.

> (and caller ID is easily faked)

It's been a long time since I was into telephony stuff, but IIRC caller ID is easily faked but ANI is not. Do verifications use CID or ANI?

they use ANI, as they're toll free numbers you're dialing (which means they're already capturing ANI for billing purposes[1].)

this is also why caller ID blocking (as provided by your telco) doesn't work when calling toll-free numbers.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identificatio...

False: the card is inactive until someone activates it.

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