With effect from 1st December 2013, debit card holders will be required to enter their ATM PIN every time when they use their debit card in merchant outlets or POS.
From the date of intimation, most of the banks have started sending SMS and emails to their customers for such awareness. But the question is how safe these transactions would be while entering your ATM PIN that is used to withdraw money from ATM machine at a place surrounding with peoples.
In case you use your ATM PIN at merchant outlets then be careful about the cameras that are in cash counter at outlets and the persons standing back to you. Cover the machine with your other hand while entering PIN into it and make sure that others are not noting down your ATM PIN.
What happens when you swap your card in smaller outlets? Can you trust the merchant? Merchants or their employees can use skimmer to capture your card’s magnetic information and then with your ATM PIN and card information, these peoples can make a fake card for their use.
For a layman it’s always hard to find out whether the merchant outlet or POS are safe for using debit cards or not.
In debit card, your transactions will directly take out money from your bank account. In case your card is misused you have no other way to get back your money until the issue is resolved and banks are agreed to it. The better solution would be not to use your debit card and instead use your credit card for all these types of transactions.
In case, anything happened because of card misuse then such things can be taken up with the bank or credit card issuer and you will not be required to pay for it in advance.