The american reliance on magstrips is crazy. Over here(Poland) I don't think I've seen a magstrip-compatible terminal for years, they just don't have the swipe part anymore, it's been removed from terminals and cash registers ages ago.
We still have the stupid policy in restaurants where you hand your card to the server and they walk away with it (their terminals are usually chip), which is something that a lot of foreigners freak out about.
Well yes, we're being told by our banks specifically that if you give anyone your card and they walk away with it, they won't cover you for fraud. The card has to stay in your sight at all times. In fact if you are in EU and you find a business that does this, you can report them to Visa/Mastercard and they will get a warning if not outright lose their terminal.
And rightfully so! What is stopping them from copying the PAN, expiry date and CVV2? I wouldn't give my card to anyone - that's what portable (wifi/BT) terminals are for.
Credit cards handle risk very differently than we do for account passwords. They expect numbers to leak regularly, but the downside of a leak is bounded in a way that password leaks often aren't, and the issuers and merchants eat those losses as a cost of business.
Even at drive-through restaurants, the cashier hands you the entire corded terminal through the window (well, most of the time contactless payments are used, in which case they simply hold it out for you to tap your card until they hear a beeeep). During Covid, most places mounted them on the end of a stick, and that practice has continued even once social distancing requirements were lifted.
No security is perfect but that's no reason to skip basic easy precautions
That said, the switch to chip and contactless is happening pretty rapidly, in my experience, with an also entirely expected long tail of merchants that will probably hold on to their legacy POSes as long as technically possible.
The big one is liability. In the US the cardholder is rarely liable for fraud charges. Which is why the minutiae of credit card security mechanisms just kind of doesn’t matter to us.
But from my understanding, in Europe and places like India, the cardholder is usually liable. Which also explains why cardholders seem to be a lot more anxious about these things in those countries and don’t really understand how Americans don’t care too much, say, that a waiter can walk off with your credit card at a restaurant.
Not claiming one system is better than the other… actually no, maybe I’m biased but I’m happy that the US system places liability on businesses rather than consumers. Which is why most US customers don’t care about these things and freely use their cards for everything.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "usually" but no, in the EU generally you just go to the police station which has a form for declaring credit card fraud and the bank often reimburses you before receiving it. Your replacement card is free on this situation. It is up to the bank to get their money back if they want to bother.
I don't know of a situation where you wouldn't get reimbursed by your bank.
My point was mainly that technical differences don’t tell the whole story.
I have McDonald's gift cards in Canada, and I use the swipe for that.
The magstrip readers are not removed from the terminals, even the newest smartphone-like have them, you just don't know where to look. Of course, sometimes cashiers are surprised that my card is magstrip-only and they are double-surprised when I show them where is the magstrip reader on the terminal they use :)