The US began its transition to chip-based credit cards in earnest in October 2015, after high-profile credit card hacks in the previous years at Target, Home Depot, Michaels, and other big-box retailers. Today, although only 59 percent of US storefronts have terminals that accept chip cards, fraud has dropped 70 percent from September 2015 to December 2017 for those retailers that have completed the chip upgrade, according to Visa.
On the other hand, fraud dropping 70 percent for retailers who install chip cards seems great. Chip-embedded cards aren’t un-hackable, but they do make it harder to use stolen credit card numbers en masse as we saw in the Target’s 2013 breach. Chip cards also can’t prevent against Card-Not-Present (or CNP) fraud, which takes place when card information is stolen online, by mail, or over the phone. If retailers upgrade to terminals that accept chip-embedded cards but leave their online marketplaces insecure, they can still leave customers open to fraud and leave themselves open to processing fraudulent payments.
Read full story here: What Happened After The US Moved To Chip-Embedded Payment Cards? | Ars Technica
