Merchants rarely give more than a customary glance to your signature, so could you get away with drawing pictures or writing insults instead of signing your name? John Hargrave finds out.
While researching another article, we stumbled upon the Credit Card Prank, a series of stories by a man named John Hargrave published on
zug.com.
Frustrated by merchants who didn't check the signature on his transactions, John decided to discover how ridiculous he could make his signature before anyone noticed. He began by simply scribbling, until his signature no longer resembled the signature on the back of his card.
When no-one noticed, he moved onto a simple 'X', then a stick-figure caricature of himself, then his name in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Still, his signature was accepted.
Throughout the whole experiment, John took photographs of his receipts after signing them. Unbelievably, this did nothing to raise the suspicions of any of the merchants he encountered.
Next, John began signing his name as different people, including Mariah Carey, Beethoven and Zeus. When no-one noticed, he blatantly signed his signature 'Please check ID' and 'I Stole this Card'.
On a trip to the aquarium, Hargrave signed his receipt as Shamu (the name of a whale at Seaworld), complete with a small drawing of the whale.
He even tried signing receipts as the names of competitor companies, writing 'Kris P Kreme' for a purchase from Dunkin Donuts.
When John encountered electronic signature pads, he signed his receipts as 'My Butt', a scale diagram of the human digestive system and the musical notation of a song he wrote entitled 'The Poo Song'. Still, no-one noticed.
It wasn't until John tried to purchase three high-end plasma TVs from Circuit City with a signature that read 'NOT AUTHORIZED' than anyone caught on.
You can read Hargrave's full article at
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card/index.html 
