The purpose of EMV isn't really to counter physical theft, it's to counter passive theft using devices like skimmers. > How is this ANY different other than ha

The purpose of EMV isn't really to counter physical theft, it's to counter passive theft using devices like skimmers. > How is this ANY different other than harder to implement a scanner which would steal the swipe [...] The magnetic stripe on the card is essentially just a barcode read by magnets. Like a regular barcode, it's trivial to copy. The chip on a card is actually a very low power computer that uses cryptography to produce an authentication token the scanner can present to a bank to authenticate a single purchase. It's essentially impossible to recreate the entire chip and the token can only be used on the purchase it was intended for so skimmers are pretty much dead. You can read a little more about it here http://www.firstdata.com/downloads/thought-leadership/EMV-Encrypt-Tokenization-WP.PDF http://www.firstdata.com/downloads/thought-leadership/EMV-En...