Arco- Marathon?

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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by storewanderer »

I noticed today in Sparks, NV an Arco taking credit cards. Price was 3.55 cash/3.65 credit and debit still runs at .35 fee.

There is also a newly branded Marathon around the corner; this is a station that has previously been a number of operators, closed and opened again multiple times, etc. It was 3.42 regardless of payment type.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by J-Man »

I've avoided ARCO for decades since I only pay with credit cards, so if they're changing their policy, they need to do it chain-wide and advertise it if they want to win back customers like me. Because I'm not going to bother going into an ARCO to check whether or not it accepts credit cards.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by Alpha8472 »

The ones that accept credit cards in Northern California have been putting up signs by the road advertising that they take credit cards.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by veteran+ »

J-Man wrote: April 26th, 2021, 8:30 am I've avoided ARCO for decades since I only pay with credit cards, so if they're changing their policy, they need to do it chain-wide and advertise it if they want to win back customers like me. Because I'm not going to bother going into an ARCO to check whether or not it accepts credit cards.
Ditto with me!

I never ever use debit and rarely use cash.

8-)
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by storewanderer »

So- in April a gas station over in Sparks, NV at 2169 Prater Way which was previously unbranded, put some temporary signage up and became a Marathon. I can verify this was an active and functioning Marathon based on a credit card transaction I did there and when I pulled up the merchant data it linked to Marathon HQ in Ohio.

Was over there tonight and the Marathon signage has been removed and it is back to being unbranded again...

Have never seen a gas station re-brand then de-brand after one month...

This gas station has opened and closed a couple times in recent years. Long ago it was an Exxon. Then it was a Winners Corner (local jobber) and they sold out to Terrible Herbst who promptly rebranded this to a Texaco with a temporary rebranding package, no real imaging, and ran it for a few years. Terrible Herbst had some issue with its loan on the stations around Reno (the stations were failing), the bank that held the loan was taken over by FDIC, so FDIC was stuck with the bad loan, and considered foreclosing on the gas stations, but then members of the Herbst family bought the bad loan back from the FDIC and proceeded to close or unload most of the Reno area stations after that whole episode, this one and a few other real clunker stations, it just closed outright (nobody wanted it) at that time.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by rwsandiego »

J-Man wrote: April 26th, 2021, 8:30 am I've avoided ARCO for decades since I only pay with credit cards, so if they're changing their policy, they need to do it chain-wide and advertise it if they want to win back customers like me. Because I'm not going to bother going into an ARCO to check whether or not it accepts credit cards.
Wise move. At the bank I work for Arco has consistently been in the top three fraud-generating merchants for the past 20 years. Their terminals are apparently easy to hijack with a magnetic stripe and PIN-harvesting device.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by storewanderer »

rwsandiego wrote: May 6th, 2021, 11:10 pm
J-Man wrote: April 26th, 2021, 8:30 am I've avoided ARCO for decades since I only pay with credit cards, so if they're changing their policy, they need to do it chain-wide and advertise it if they want to win back customers like me. Because I'm not going to bother going into an ARCO to check whether or not it accepts credit cards.
Wise move. At the bank I work for Arco has consistently been in the top three fraud-generating merchants for the past 20 years. Their terminals are apparently easy to hijack with a magnetic stripe and PIN-harvesting device.
Arco finally discontinued use of those "middle of island payment kiosks" which were a fraud nightmare and installed what are supposed to be very secure payment terminals on each gas pump. This move took place 3-4 years ago now. Supposedly their current point of sale system does not support those middle of island payment kiosks and that is why those got disabled (but are still present at some stations or have been hidden to look like a canopy support post). The kiosks may come back- but only for cash, not for cards.

Forced use of PIN-based debit cards made Arco a hot target for fraud. Folks can do a lot with those card numbers and PIN numbers and at a place like Arco where 100% of cards were going through as debit it was very easy to compromise the machines, put a camera up that watched people enter their PIN numbers at that centralized payment kiosk, and get a lot of card numbers and PIN numbers real fast.

I used to use gift cards from grocery stores to fuel at Arco and used those payment kiosks (either BP or Arco gift cards back then were accepted). I never had a gift card compromised but I tried to liquidate them almost as fast as I got them.

I am going to be interested to see if the gas station card fraud syndicate down in SoCal is able to break the "chip" technology and continue the ongoing card fraud ring down there as more and more stations turn the chip readers on. SoCal accounts for the vast majority of card fraud for the national major gas station chains due to some groups who are really, really good at installing skimmers, cameras, and cloning cards. This has been going on for decades now. It isn't just credit and debit cards that get compromised but also fleet cards.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by bryceleinan »

storewanderer wrote: May 6th, 2021, 11:35 pm
rwsandiego wrote: May 6th, 2021, 11:10 pm
J-Man wrote: April 26th, 2021, 8:30 am I've avoided ARCO for decades since I only pay with credit cards, so if they're changing their policy, they need to do it chain-wide and advertise it if they want to win back customers like me. Because I'm not going to bother going into an ARCO to check whether or not it accepts credit cards.
Wise move. At the bank I work for Arco has consistently been in the top three fraud-generating merchants for the past 20 years. Their terminals are apparently easy to hijack with a magnetic stripe and PIN-harvesting device.
Arco finally discontinued use of those "middle of island payment kiosks" which were a fraud nightmare and installed what are supposed to be very secure payment terminals on each gas pump. This move took place 3-4 years ago now. Supposedly their current point of sale system does not support those middle of island payment kiosks and that is why those got disabled (but are still present at some stations or have been hidden to look like a canopy support post). The kiosks may come back- but only for cash, not for cards.

Forced use of PIN-based debit cards made Arco a hot target for fraud. Folks can do a lot with those card numbers and PIN numbers and at a place like Arco where 100% of cards were going through as debit it was very easy to compromise the machines, put a camera up that watched people enter their PIN numbers at that centralized payment kiosk, and get a lot of card numbers and PIN numbers real fast.

I used to use gift cards from grocery stores to fuel at Arco and used those payment kiosks (either BP or Arco gift cards back then were accepted). I never had a gift card compromised but I tried to liquidate them almost as fast as I got them.

I am going to be interested to see if the gas station card fraud syndicate down in SoCal is able to break the "chip" technology and continue the ongoing card fraud ring down there as more and more stations turn the chip readers on. SoCal accounts for the vast majority of card fraud for the national major gas station chains due to some groups who are really, really good at installing skimmers, cameras, and cloning cards. This has been going on for decades now. It isn't just credit and debit cards that get compromised but also fleet cards.
Last time I went to Arco, they had Apple Pay / NFC at the pump, so I used that. If you can, tapping is much safer due to how transactions are tokenized. Costco has Apple Pay too.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by Brian Lutz »

I've started to see a few stations around here accepting NFC payment, but there are also a lot of them that have the NFC readers on the pumps but you will just get a "card type not supported" error if you try to use one.
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Re: Arco- Marathon?

Post by storewanderer »

Brian Lutz wrote: May 9th, 2021, 9:12 pm I've started to see a few stations around here accepting NFC payment, but there are also a lot of them that have the NFC readers on the pumps but you will just get a "card type not supported" error if you try to use one.
The Tesoro-affiliated Arcos added NFC at the pump years ago (ironic since they didn't accept credit cards, largely useless). It is MSD Contactless still not EMV Contactless. So far only EMV Contactless at the pump I've seen is Maverik and Speedway.

The BP-affiliated Arcos up until fairly recently did not have software that would support NFC at the pump, but now have software that will support it. From what I have seen not many of the locations have it. And a couple I've tried it at (both up in WA and around Sacramento) give me an error that says RFID NOT SUPPORTED like you describe. But I have gotten it to work at a few BP Arcos. It is MSD Contactless still not EMV Contactless.
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