Yes, it absolutely does "kind of disappear". That's exactly what happens from the customer's perspective.

And that's their own deliberate choice too: they chose this instead of building an actually secure system. Passing these costs to the customer is the real victim blaming here, and it should be straight up illegal.

Sadly not enough countries enforce caps on credit card fees, but some do, and more should follow suit. They should be forced to eat the losses caused by their own choices, not get bailed out by pushing the costs on to customers or whatever.

That only works if you believe people are retarded.

Card users are well aware that fraud losses are covered by the fees they pay for using a card, whether those fees are made explicitly or not.

If customers of services aren’t paying for the service, who will? What other source of revenue do merchants have?

Australia just passed legislation that merchants aren’t allowed to charge a fee for using a card. That is: they aren’t allowed to have a line item on the receipt for using a card.

The customers still pay, because all of the merchant’s revenue comes from their customers.

So what will happen is: merchants will charge more for every product so they don’t lose.

This means even when paying with cash you will effectively pay the card surcharge.

Of the ten or so merchants I spoke with in the two weeks prior to the legislation being enacted, they all said exactly that.

Customers aren’t stupid, despite the fact that there are some stupid customers.

Meanwhile, the banks reduced their card service fees by, on average, 0.1%.

So if you tally card + cash transactions, customers are worse off because merchants can no longer charge only those customers who pay by card. Instead, they have to raise prices for everyone.

There are approximately no problems people face where the answer is: more government.