EMV (chip) cards are far, far more secure than magstripe cards. It's a tradeoff I'm happy to make, since my card number's been stolen 3 times in the last two years.
User can just swipe and sign a stolen card same as always. Most retailers stll either incapable of using them or very forgiving as to signatures.
Card can be duplicated with the strip and without the chip, then used as a regular legacy card (until those become uncommon).
Finally, they can just steal the chip + signature cared, use the chip and they can still sign the slip and use it sama as ever.
Hell, it's 2016 and I'm still encountering retailers who end up having to key in the card, or in a couple of cases still do offline processing with manual carbon-slip imprints.
Our shitty American cards affect the rest of the world too. Traveling to Europe over the past decade+ until 2015 I apologize for my unexpectedly chipless card everywhere I went (never had much trouble using it though); same with Canada up to present. They all have chip+PIN, but our cards go through without and spit out a receipt with a signature line.
I don't think so. The card reader would demand that the chip be used. If there's no chip, the cashier should then call the police, as that's evidence of fraud.
The guy who steals my mag stripe has to find a store without chip readers to make use of the stripe.
Like 90% of stores in USA today? Oh the pain. And what is likely to happen after the clerk apologizes for the reader being broken is that he keys in the card number manually. What, manual entry is going to be blocked too? Good luck with that. As long as lost sales to nonworking transactions >>> fraud, it's happening.
Edit, source, Krebs: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/the-great-emv-fake-out-no...
In February, Visa claims all of 17% of retailers have chip-capable terminals. My experience is that only a small fraction of chip-capable terminals are actually integrated with a POS system that enables them. Leading to the ridiculous situation of consumers facing 83% of retail locations with no chip reader, having to swipe, most of the rest having a useless chip slot and icon, and some small percentage <10% of locations actually having a working, functional chip slot (visually indistinguable from nonfunctional ones). Even where they do work, usability is poor. Beeps, lights, multitudinous prompts or even spoken instructions, and processing times in excess of five seconds or more where the stripes are just swipe and sign a second or two later.
I've had chip cards since 2004, and their use here is universal. To swipe without raising suspicion requires an American accent. It's no problem in McDonald's, but any expensive purchase will either be denied by the clerk, require the manager's approval, or a phone call to the card processor. Criminals simply don't do it any more -- it's far easier to send stolen numbers to the USA, or make purchases online.
https://www.fbi.gov/sandiego/press-releases/2015/fbi-warns-t...
There's a fiction that the retailer should compare the signature on the card to the slip, reinforced by a few large retailers with policies of checking that the card is in fact signed, but this obviously doesn't happen.