A few gems in the 'advice' at the end of the news item (BTW link not woking as is)

- "Make sure your post is secure": How?
- "Only carry the cards you need": Should I have any I don't need?
- "If you store valuable documents at home, for example, passports, driving license and bank statements": Where else will I store them, in a warehouse?

...
Consumers prefer entering a PIN when using a debit card over all types of signature-based card payments, whether credit or debit, Gartner found. Banks promote signature-based debit payments because they earn more fee revenue from card-accepting merchants.

Banks charge more on the premise that signature-based payments are riskier and more prone to theft.

"Fraud rates on signature-based debit card payments are at least 10 times higher, and banks usually eat these costs if they are incurred in a card-present (or store) environment," Gartner analyst Avivah Litan said in a statement. "Higher interchange fees paid by merchants to banks and card issuers for signature-based transactions must offset these costs or else banks wouldn't promote the signature variety."

People's least favorite payment type is contact-less, or wireless, payments, Gartner said. There is similarly small interest in using mobile phones to make payments.

Gartner advises brick-and-mortar businesses that accept electronic payments to promote use of PIN-based debit-card payments by offering store-based incentive programs.

"Businesses pay less to banks for PIN-based payments and since consumers prefer them anyway, this is a win-win strategy for all parties except credit card issuers and banks," Litan said.

A little of the "consumers favor PINs" article discussed in this post/thread
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#3

including discussion of various efforts regarding various alternatives over nearly two decades

and runs into followup post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008d.html#8

which wanders into this reference over at digital money; short lead-in

How pathetic is it that when I want to buy something on the Internet using my bank card I have do mess around typing in endless details, numbers, codes, passwords and the like. It's all so 1994. In an a modern economy, that sort of thing is seen as being on a par with Babylonian clay tablets or filling out paper forms to make a SEPA Credit Transfer. But in advanced countries, there is another way:

... snip ...

aka, dates back to the payment gateway
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#gateway
done with small client/server startup that had invented this technology SSL
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcert
that they wanted to apply to the business processes ... now frequently referred to as "electronic commerce".