Comment by lxgr

That's largely a myth these days.

> Debit cards do not share these protections by law

No, debit cards are covered by Regulation E, which also caps liability for fraudulent transactions, requires your issuer to provide provisional credit until the dispute case has been resolved etc.

The only practical difference in terms of the minimum fraud protections afforded by law is that you're out your own money instead of the bank's until you get that provisional credit, which can be a problem if it causes other transactions (utility bills etc.) on your checking account to bounce.

Where the two really differ significantly is for non-fraud disputes (goods/services not as expected etc.): Reg Z has explicit protections there; Reg E doesn't really talk about these.

But practically, it also doesn't really, because...

> though many banks offer some of them).

No, both Visa and Mastercard require require issuers to extend zero liability protections going beyond these regulations, so it's effectively all banks. (Capital One might be able to relax their own rules now that they own Discover, but I highly doubt they'd risk the consumer backlash for questionable benefit, since they can also just make merchants pay for card-not-present lost/stolen/card credential theft fraud and cover card-present fraud like everybody else in the US.)