One customer bought a £16 take-away and was billed for £2,672. Two men had an £80 meal with their wives and ended up paying £12,000 for the privilege. Credit card fraud - it's a curse of the technological age.

The case of the Chinese restaurateur in Liverpool who was found guilty last week of defrauding customers (see page 4) highlights the risk of using credit cards. That risk increases as technology becomes more sophisticated and, at the same time, as customers become more trusting with their plastic.

Look at how society has become less wary. We walk into stores and purchase goods worth thousands of pounds with the flash of a card; we pick up the phone to book theatre tickets (for example) and read out credit card numbers and give our address as easily as telling the time. We even find ourselves tapping our most intimate details into the ether by way of the Internet. In other words, we live in a world where money - good, old-fashioned cash - hardly needs to exist.

And we accept this quite happily. After all, it's a lot easier to walk around without loose change.

The problem, however, is that this 21st-century approach to money places increased responsibility on those dealing with payments. Most of the time this works OK, but the system exposes more people to temptation. And the temptation to abuse credit cards seems to be one step removed from actually stealing cash. In the mind of the criminal, fraud is apparently a "softer" crime than direct theft.

But fraud isn't a soft crime and anyone who fails the test - such as Mr Ho in Liverpool - should be dealt with harshly. It's not the dishonesty of the fraud that's the crime, it's the betrayal of trust, which is worse.

Obviously, restaurants can't avoid handling credit cards, and temptation will always be put in front of staff. What catering must avoid, however, is falling into the category of "industry most likely to".

Unlike other credit-card transactions, even telephone and Internet shopping, in a restaurant the card is usually physically taken away from the customer. While it's out of sight, anything could happen. Mr Ho, for example, was running cards through a cloning machine.

Again, this is a sign of the trusting times we live in. In the old days, customers would never have handed blank cheques to a waiter, allowing them to be taken into a backroom to be filled out and brought back to the table for signing. But we don't think twice about doing that with our credit cards.

The answer, then, is to introduce procedures, already common in the USA, where the card is scanned or imprinted in front of the customer - as it would be, in fact, in a shop or at the reception desk of a hotel. Restaurants would then be able to cast aside any danger of suspicion.

This is something that shouldn't just be talked about, it should be actively encouraged in restaurants as "best practice". To misquote English Literary scholar CS Lewis: "I'd sooner live among people who didn't cheat at cards than among people who simply talked about not cheating at cards."

Forbes Mutch

Editor

Caterer & Hotelkeeper