When Seeing should not be Believing: Photographs, Credit Cards and Fraud RICHARD KEMP, NICOLA TOWELL and GRAHAM PIKE Division of Psychology, University of Westminster, London, UK SUMMARY Identity cards often include a photograph of the bearer in an attempt to prevent fraudulent use or personation. In the U.K. some credit card companies have recently introduced photo-credit cards and the government is currently considering the introduction of a new driving licence including the bearer's photograph. However, the widely held belief that the inclusion of photographs will reduce or prevent fraudulent use has never been tested. This paper describes a field study designed to examine the utility of photo-credit cards by assessing the accuracy with which supermarket cashiers could identify whether the photographs on credit cards depicted the person tendering them. The results demonstrate that the task of matching the photograph to the shopper is much more difficult than might be expected, and that even under optimized conditions, performance is poor. It is concluded that the introduction of photographs on credit cards would have little effect on the detection of fraud at the point of sale. & 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 11: 211±222 (1997) No. of Figures: 0 No. of Tables: 3 No. of References: 18 INTRODUCTION During 1994, the fraudulent use of cheque and credit cards in the U.K. cost approximately £100 million, 1 a cost that is ultimately met by more honest card users. Furthermore, many police officers believe that the perceived value of credit cards is a major incentive to theft. For these reasons the public, the police, retailers and credit card issuing companies all have an incentive to make the fraudulent use of credit cards more difficult. The inclusion of a photograph of the legal card holder would seem to be a simple and fool-proof way of achieving this objective, and some of the CCC 0888±4080/97/030211±12$17.50 Received 27 October 1995 & 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 4 July 1996 APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, VOL. 11, 211±222 (1997) We would like to express our gratitude to the various organizations whose assistance made this study possible. In particular we would like to thank the manager and staff of the supermarket for taking part in this study and for providing us with valuable insights. We would also like to thank Terry Burke and the MultiStrategies Division of Malcolm Hurlston Corporate Consultants Ltd for assisting in the organization of this study, and Graham Hole for his useful comments on our experimental design. Finally, we would like to thank the students who acted as shoppers in the experimental study and/or allowed us to take their photographs, and our colleagues who helped with the data collection. Address correspondence to: Dr R. Kemp, Division of Psychology, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1R 8AL. 1 This estimate is based on figures supplied by the Association for Payment Clearing Services. Some other sources suggest that the loss is much higher (see, for example, Clough, 1994).