There are many jokes about the handwriting of certain health professionals. If your GP has to sign thousands of prescriptions, is he or she going to take five minutes to get their moniker in crystal clear cursive script? No way. Many doctors write in the language of gibberish. But some of us who are not quacks still need to scrawl our name from time to time and this is certainly true for those who give their plastic a good workout.

How many times a day, a week or a month do you use your credit card? If you shop with it, book into hotels and hire cars a lot, then your signature will be required many times. Do you painstakingly ensure that your signature is perfect and exactly matches the signature which appears on the back of your card? I dont.

Heres another question. How many times when you sign the credit card docket does the person serving you turn over your card and compare the two signatures? My experience is not manytimes if ever. If you are well dressed and well-spoken and clearly not under the influence of drugs, why would the attendant doubt your honesty? Besides there are other customers waiting and there hasnt been a rash of fraudulent credit cards this week.

So that brings us to the signature you actually make to give authority to your credit card purchase. Who checks your signature? If the clerk or attendant doesnt check it then does the bank? Can you imagine how many squillion receipts are created every time someone uses their credit card? Of course some transactions are fraudulent but millions are legal. So does the bank have an employee/s whose job it is to look at every signature to check if it is suspect? If so, who would want that job?

Perhaps the bank would wait until a dodgy entry appeared on their radar or until a customer contacted the bank asking what a particular entry was doing on their statement.

So if all the above is true, have you ever considered writing your signature in a slightly less than accurate fashion? Mind you it is certainly illegal to defraud or try and defraud using a false name with your credit card but I know a bloke who thought hed give the system a little test.

He was a genuine purchaser and only used his credit card for things he genuinely wanted but he still thought the checking procedures were not always as good as they might have been. He started in a small way. He changed his signature to a squiggle and then to a letter followed by a flat line. Then he moved to using an X followed by a wavy line. All these purchases with the made-up signatures sailed through without a murmur.

Now Im not advocating you try this suspect signature lark but it does make you think.