Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 July 29

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 29

Register receipt security

At one point, according to the popular press, there was fear that the printed receipts from stores and other businesses contained confidential information - that someone with the right skills or tools could use your receipt to deduce your credit card number. Is there any truth to that? My family has long been paranoid about ensuring all their register receipts get shredded, but I don't see anything on there that looks like it could possibly be related. (There are exceptions and edge cases, of course; I believe Amazon still prints a portion of the CC# on their receipts and receipts from health care providers may have other confidential information on them, but I'm thinking here of the typical printout you get from a store or restaurant). Should these be shredded or just recycled? Matt Deres (talk) 14:50, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

The typical credit card receipt has just the last four digits of your credit card number. And shredding your own copies won't do much good if someone at the store got the info. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:54, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

You can do a surprising amount of damage with the last four digits of a credit card number. Many places stupidly use it for ID verification when you call in to reset a password or something.

So in theory someone picking through your trash who got your name and your last-four digits could probably use Google to find enough additional information to steal your identity.

Here's a scary story along those lines, but it does not start with a printed receipt : [1]

The fact that the attacker was able to social-engineer the last-four-digits out of an online retailer tells me that picking through someone's trash would be doing things the hard way. Which is how I justify to my self not worrying too much about receipts. (Although I do try to make sure they actually wind up in trash not laying around on a restaurant table or something.)

ApLundell (talk) 17:59, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

Which is why my usual practice is to hand the receipt holder directly to the waiter/waitress. Of course, to avoid such risks, pay in cash! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:34, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

In the UK at least, it used to be common for shops to print the full credit card number on a receipt. There is a BBC article about it and the risks here "Only relatively recently did the card companies change their standards so that we were allowed not to print out all the numbers," explains David Smith from the British Retail Consortium". I'm not sure if this was true elsewhere too. Franmars (talk) 12:54, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

It also used to be common in USA. It's been a long time since I've seen it, though. Seems like it was outlawed in 2003, but I suppose you might still come across someone with an old cash register who hasn't heard the news. (Incidentally, the old fashioned impression receipts (cha-chunk cha-chunk!) are exempt from this law. Which makes sense, but any retailers who still have one of those old things only pull it out during power outages.) ApLundell (talk) 18:50, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

References