Credit card cards. Merchants often advertise which cards they accept by displaying acceptance marks – generally derived from logos – or this may be communicated in signage in the establishment or in company material (e.g., a restaurant's menu may indicate which credit cards are accepted). Merchants may also communicate this orally, as in "We take (brands X, Y, and Z)" or "We don't take credit cards". The credit card issuer issues a credit card to a customer at the time or after an account has been approved by the credit provider, which need not be the same entity as the card issuer.
Credit card States. However, they do not have the resources to pursue all criminals, and in general they only prosecute cases exceeding $5,000. Three improvements to card security have been introduced to the more common credit card networks, but none has proven to help reduce credit card fraud so far. First, the cards themselves are being replaced with similar-looking tamper-resistant smart cards which are intended to make forgery more difficult. The majority of smart card (IC card) based credit cards comply with the EMV (Europay MasterCard Visa) standard. Second, an additional 3 or 4 digit card security code (CSC) is now present