EFT transactions may be accompanied by methods to authenticate the card and the cardholder. The merchant may manually verify the cardholder's signature, or the cardholder's Personal identification number (PIN) may be sent online in an encrypted form for validation by the card issuer. Other information may be included in the transaction, some of which is not visible to the cardholder (for instance magnetic stripe data), and some of which may be requested from the cardholder.