Fingerprint recognition in schools

[Nicholas Bohm]

Ian Batten wrote:
>>
>> I suspect (a) and (c) are very widespread, though expecting a cheque to
>> be legal tender is fairly startling.
> 
> Not that uncommon.  For example,Guardian Money section letters page, Feb
> 2 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/feb/02/2):
> 
>> "Your M&S" will no longer apply to customers who prefer to pay by
>> cheque. A few notices have begun to appear in branches stating that
>> cheques will not be accepted after March 1. How does M&S justify this
>> change in policy? Is there any way that customers might convince M&S
>> that cards are not the only way to pay? Oh yes, there will doubtless
>> be a cash machine somewhere in the store, but you'll need a card to
>> access that, too.
>>
>> Help! I am a frequent customer of many years' standing and want to
>> continue to pay by cheque. After all, I thought cheques are still
>> legal tender - or is that about to change as well?
>> Ann Atkinson-Daynes, London
>>
>>
>>
>> So cheque forgery is a form of identity fraud which almost always
>> lumbers the bank, not the customer.
> 
> I had a cheque book and cheque card stolen from a gym sometime in the
> mid eighties, and indeed I didn't get stuck for it.  However, it was a
> fairly painful piece of haggling with the bank to recover the three
> hundred quid, sufficiently so that I changed bank in an era when
> changing bank was rather harder.
> 
>>  But with chip and pin, and online
>> payments, the banks often get away with the line that it was your
>> number/password, so it must have been you or you must have been careless
>> in breach of the banking code, and you rather than the bank get lumbered.
> 
> Do we have any solid evidence that they `get away with the line' more
> than they did in the past?  Legal rights are one thing, actually
> enforcing them is quite another.

I doubt if there is evidence of the volumes in question - the banks are
the only ones who could keep the records, and I'm sure they don't.

What is clear is that with cheques, there is a small amount of hard
evidence (the disputed cheque); and I'm sure most forgeries are only
just good enough to deceive the paying bank (or accepting merchant in
cheque card cases), because making a really good forgery (one good
enough to make a document examiner think it genuine) is a lot harder.
So most forgeries are hard for the bank to dispute against a persistent
customer.

With cards/online, there's a huge cloud of waffle from bank
pseudo-experts about the wonders of the bank system and what its
unintelligible logs are supposed to prove, and very little for the
customer to get a grip on.  The Ombudsman considers the bank evidence
without revealing it to the customer, and usually swallows it whole
before regurgitating it coated with a little condescending sugar of
assertion about the Ombudsman's knowledge of the technical issues.  The
courts often don't understand the technical stuff, and it takes a strong
legal/technical team to stand a chance of forcing most banks to deliver
the evidence and system details needed to assess what really went wrong.

So as far as risk allocation goes, I'd say the cheque was still the
customer's friend when it comes to making payments.  (Not when receiving
them; but that's another histoire.)

Nicholas
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