As EMV becomes more popular, fraudsters look for new ways to steal money - MasterCard

According to the source, retailers and banks are being held to a deadline of October 2015 to roll out chip-enabled cards and payment terminals, after which point liability for fraudulent transactions will shift over to whichever party has the lesser technology. Chip & PIN cards store data on a chip, rather than the card’s magnetic stripe, and are far more difficult to counterfeit. The new cards, while harder to duplicate, won’t put a stopgap on all credit card fraud. They don’t offer extra defenses against fraudulent online purchases, which are expected to grow as EMV becomes more popular.

Johan Gerber, senior VP of processing products at MasterCard, fears that once the door to card fraud closes, criminals are going to try to find other ways to get their money, which financial breaches being one of them.

Currently, about 60%-70% of payment terminals in the US are capable of handling EMV transactions, according to Carolyn Balfany, who leads U.S. product delivery at MasterCard. However, while many terminals might be equipped hardware-wise to handle EMV, only about 26% of merchants are projected to turn that functionality on by the end of 2015.

Johan Gerber from MasterCard also mentioned that the company is working with banks to continually improve security and spot anomalies as US banks are currently only going halfway with the Chip & PIN technology. Most banks continue to ask customers who pay with the new cards to scrawl signatures on receipts instead of inserting the card into a reader and then entering a four-digit personal identification number as a second layer of security, even though signatures are useless.