I was once on a London bus and I heard a guy asking someone to order a ticket over a phone to someone else who i assumed was going to do the booking - might have been an airline ticket. He shouted out all his credit card details, plus just about everything else one would need to order stuff off his account!
The gift shop at work sometimes gives wonderful examples of people's blase attitudes to such matters. On one occasion a PIN was yelled across the shop for a purchase. My colleague, whose patience has already been sorely tried by the person concerned refused to proceed on the grounds that she knew that the card owner wasn't the person making the purchase on that card. After much harrumphing and low level abuse the card owner did the transaction herself, but couldn't seem to get it into her head that if she wanted to do something wrong that was her problem but we weren't prepared to collude.
On another occasion a girl came in with her membership pass and then wanted to pay for an additional person using a card with a different name which, when asked, she happily admitted was her mother's, and no her mother wasn't there - 'but she lets me use her card 'cos I can't afford things'. This I suppose is the logical(!) conclusion of the move to cards instead of cash; if you would lend/give cash to someone for a purchase then providing the wherewithal to use a card for the same purpose is seen as no different.
What annoys me about such incidents is that when things go wrong the expectation is that 'they' will fix it, which ultimately means that those of us who don't indulge in such practices end up paying for those who do. There is a world of difference in terms of entitlement to redress in my book between those who knowingly/willingly invite fraud on their accounts and those who are unwittingly conned by slick scams.
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