Customers swipe their own credit cards at restaurants in Tenn.

Matt Charette knows the customers at his three local restaurants trust him every time they turn over their credit cards to pay a tab.
That's why he's started putting bright yellow cards that read "customer swipe" with the checks, giving customers the option to walk over to the wait station and run their own cards. As a business owner, he says, it's a small comfort he can offer. As a fellow consumer, he hopes he'll get people thinking about being safer with their credit cards.
According to a report issued last week by the Federal Trade Commission, the Nashville-Murfreesboro region reported about 5,200 instances of fraud to the agency in 2008, ranking it in the middle of the pack among the 382 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The region was about two-thirds up the list in complaints of identity theft, with nearly 1,400 reported

Link: http://tennessean.com/article/20090302/NEWS01/903020333