BOSTON -- With credit card fraud on the rise, WCVB-TV in Boston decided to test if store clerks check to see if credit cards really belong to the person using them.

In the first test, a shopper walked into Circuit City and bought several hundred dollars of merchandise with a credit card. The shopper swiped the card and walked out with the merchandise.

The cashier didn’t ask any questions about the card. In fact, she didn't even look at it. She had no way of knowing that the shopper wasn't using her own card -- she was using a card provided by a reporter from the television station.

The station shopped at some of the biggest chain stores in the area using other people's credit cards and repeatedly found no one checking.

At Walgreens, the female shopper swiped a man's credit card and signed her name -- and no one noticed. The same thing happened at The Home Depot and Stop and Shop.

"I always signed my legal name," said shopper Sarah Stolper. "So the signature never matched the name on the credit card."

At Stop and Shop, Stolper used her own store loyalty card and somone else's credit card. Again, no one noticed the discrepancy.

"No one stopped me at the Stop and Shop. As you can see, not even a cashier walked over. Nothing," Stolper said.

Stolper experienced the same thing at BJ's Wholesale Club. No one noticed different names on the membership and credit cards.

The only exception was Best Buy. When the clerk noticed the credit card wasn't signed on the back, the shopper was asked for identification.

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"I'm thinking, 'We're going to get caught.' I'm really thinking this is going to be it," said Stolper.

But it wasn't. Stolper said she was doing a story for the television station and the clerk never checked further.

"There I go with $600 worth of iPods," she said.

When the station called the retailers, they said they train their employees to be watchful, but they depend on the credit card company's sophisticated technology to instantly register stolen cards and stop a sale.

When the station called the banks, they confirmed the technology and added it has drastically cut down on retail fraud.

The companies said their main fraud concentration now is online, where signatures are never required.