President Obama is not immune to credit card troubles.
When he was in New York last month for the United Nations General Assembly, the president went out to dinner with first lady Michelle Obama. But when it came time to pay the bill, his card was declined.
{mosads}“Turns out I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on,” Obama said in off-the-cuff remarks on Friday, while signing an executive order creating new protections for people’s financial and personal information.
“Fortunately, Michelle had hers,” he added, to laughs from the raucous crowd at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “But I was trying to explain to the waitress: ‘You know, I really think that I’ve been paying my bills.'”
“Even I’m affected by it.”
Obama on Friday announced that the cards issued by the federal government would soon come with more secure technology that included a digital chip in addition to a magnetic stripe on the back of the card. The cards would also allow people to enter a PIN number instead of their signature, a security standard common for ATMs.
The White House order comes after a seemingly endless drumbeat of reports about major data breaches at retailers and financial institutions from Target to Home Depot to JPMorgan Chase, which have compromised personal and financial data about hundreds of millions of Americans.