I recently went out to eat dinner with a friend at a restaurant I had never been to before. After paying, I was pleasantly surprised when the waitress made a point to tell us that our full credit card account number had been printed on the restaurant’s copy of the receipt. She said that the full account number usually wasn’t printed on the receipt, but they had to run the credit card in a different way than usual, resulting in the full number being left on display. Because the credit card number hadn’t been truncated as mandated by a recent change to the law, the waitress mindfully suggested that we scratch out the numbers before discarding the receipt.
But in recent years, there has been some legislative changes to the growing problem of identity theft related to this particular problem. The Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act of 2003 (FACTA) added new language and several new sections to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), intended to address the issue of credit card information on consumer receipts.
FACTA does allow businesses to print out the entire credit card number but only on the merchant’s copy of the receipt. The copy that goes to the customer needs to truncate credit card information on receipts to show no more than the last five digits of the credit card number. FACTA also requires that the expiration date cannot be included on the copy of the receipt that the customer receives. There’s no doubt that receipts that have full account numbers and expiration dates are a veritable treasure trove for identity thieves.
While the newly amended FACTA legislation has put a national standard in place mandating truncation of credit card information, there were a couple of notable loopholes in the FACTA law. First, the new section does not apply to imprinted or handwritten copies of receipts on debit cards or credit cards. Second, all machines or terminals that were in use prior to January 1, 2005, the merchant had a full 3 years to comply to the new law and for machines in use after January 1, 2005, the merchant has just one year to gain compliance.
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