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Comment by wwarren | Hacker News Reader

As a british immigrant to North America, I couldn't believe how far behind in this regard the States and Canada were. Canada has since caught up, but the US is only now getting there.

Anecdotal story: the only time my credit card has been defrauded is after a 3 day stay in the USA

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I have read that after the EMV system was introduced in the UK the fraud rate actually went up. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/6/175170-emv/fulltext

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Care to explain how and why the fraud rate went up?

Chip and PIN cards are widely deployed here in Spain, and all cases of fraud around me involved drunk people not covering the keypad when entering their PIN. In ATMs there's a nice animation of a hand covering the number pad, but not on POS (LCD displays just say "Enter your PIN"), and many people are careless or forget to do so.

I used to hear more cases of CC fraud back when magnetic strips were used, but I might just be biased.

It's worth noting that because you add this chip, it doesn't necessarily mean you remove the magnetic stripe.

My VISA (issued by a Danish bank), has both a chip and the magnetic stripe.

Hopefully the data on that stripe becomes a lot less useful though, as part of the data is saying "I have a chip!" and the merchant is under financial pressure not to accept stripe transactions after switchover due to the liability shift.

That’s pretty much just so the card is usable in the US if you travel there though.

And also when the card reader in the store here in Denmark says "Use the magnetic stripe!" for some reason.

If I know your PIN I still need to have your card with the chip on it to commit fraud. How does that part work?

It's out of my area of expertise, but you should probably find information searching for "chip skimming" and the like.

Also, as your sibling points out, most chip and PIN cards still feature a magstripe to downgrade if necessary.

I think fraud rate didn't go up at all, but EMV (Chip and PIN) had a fraud reducing effect. Of course other factors changed. You'll find references at http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/plastic_fraud_figure... and old news at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4779314.stm neither of which require Log in to Read the Full Article.

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