Almost four in five consumers believe signatures are easy to forge, with a majority favouring the introduction of PIN-based authentication at the point-of-sale, according to research commissioned by the UK's Chip and PIN programme.
The research, conducted by Tickbox.net during May 2003 from a sample of 1332 UK adults, comes as the UK banking community prepares for the gradual roll-out of Chip and PIN payments nationally from August.
In Northampton, where trials of the technology have entered their sixth week, more than 180,000 of the new style credit and debit cards have been issued and are now accepted at 600 retailers across the town.
The Chip and PIN movement has yet to release any research guaging the experience of active users of the system in Northampton. Instead, the current survey deals with the expectations of user nationally. Seventy per cent said that they believed PINs to be more secure than signatures. While one-in-four didn't mind using either method, more than half were in favour of the switch. Only nine per cent felt Chip and PIN was a bad idea.
While the introduction of the system is expected to quash fraud using counterfeit cards at the point-of-sale, crime investigators are expecting to see fraudsters migrate to identity theft and card-not-present scenarios, such as mail order, telephone sales and the Internet.