Linked – Why aren’t chip credit cards stopping “card present” fraud in the US?
Credit card fraud is up, even after the US switched to chip-based cards. what’s up with that?
“Gemini Advisory now says that 60 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen in the US in the past 12 months, and most of those were chip-based cards.
The firm found this information by trawling Dark Web sites where stolen credit card numbers are routinely sold. The firm said that 45.8 million, or 75 percent, of the numbers posted this year were stolen from a physical point-of-sale (POS) terminal in a brick-and-mortar store, while the other 25 percent were stolen from online breaches. EMV can’t protect against online fraud, so that 25 percent doesn’t say anything about chip-based card security.
But what about the other 45.8 million? Ninety percent of those cards were EMV-enabled cards. Still, that doesn’t mean that the chip security isn’t working. “These results directly reflect the lack of US merchant compliance with the EMV implementation,” Gemini writes.”
I roll my eyes every time I go into a merchant and am asked to “swipe” my credit card because either they don’t have a chip reader, or they have one that isn’t actually operational. They are the reason credit card fraud is up, and the reason why a POS skimmer still works at all.
But as long as it’s “just” the banks and credit card companies footing the bill for this fraud, we don’t really care.
As if that cost doesn’t get passed along to us.
Maybe we should start being more selective in where we shop. That might finally get merchants on board. A few “i’ll come back when you have a working chip reader for my credit card” might encourage them to get on board.
