Visa: Some merchants see dip in fraud thanks to chip cards

Re:Visa: Some merchants see dip in fraud thanks to chip cards by Veratyr on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @04:54PM (#11530320)

The purpose of EMV isn't really to counter physical theft, it's to counter passive theft using devices like skimmers.

> How is this ANY different other than harder to implement a scanner which would steal the swipe [...]

The magnetic stripe on the card is essentially just a barcode read by magnets. Like a regular barcode, it's trivial to copy.

The chip on a card is actually a very low power computer that uses cryptography to produce an authentication token the scanner can present to a bank to authenticate a single purchase. It's essentially impossible to recreate the entire chip and the token can only be used on the purchase it was intended for so skimmers are pretty much dead.

You can read a little more about it here http://www.firstdata.com/downloads/thought-leadership/EMV-En...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Visa: Some merchants see dip in fraud thanks to chip cards by dikdik on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @08:17PM (#11531500)

While this sounds great, I was just given a debit card with a chip in it. While extra protection is afforded at terminals built for cards with chips, I still only use the magnetic strip on my card at the 90%+ of terminals that are not built for chipped-cards.

[ Parent | on HN ]