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The US largely migrated to chip and signature in 2015. I think a large majority of credit card uses today are chip in the US because the issuers quickly sent ou
by pbh101 8y ago
The US largely migrated to chip and signature in 2015. I think a large majority of credit card uses today are chip in the US because the issuers quickly sent out chip cards, most terminals got updated to use them, and swipe is rejected often if chip is available.
To be clear, this is chip (and sometimes signature for large purchases) but not chip-and-pin, so the original statement of no passwords generally holds true, but the mag stripes are generally not used anymore.
- joering2 8y agoPut your chip card quickly in and out three times, next the machine will tell you to “swipe your card”.
- girvo 8y agoThis even works in chip-and-pin systems, at least here in Australia. Makes me sad, I don't really understand why falling back to what we're trying to replace is considered a good idea :(
- eythian 8y agoIt's temporary. Typical readers where I am in Europe don't even have the magstripe hardware any more.
- lostlogin 8y agoIt’s easy to accidentally invoke paywave doing this, which is annoying when trying to text if a mag strip is faulty.
- vkou 8y ago> swipe is rejected often if chip is available. It's the other way around. If you try the chip 3+ times, and it doesn't work, you can swipe the card, and the swipe transaction will work. When the more secure method fails, it falls back to the less secure one. It's lunacy.
- Guvante 8y agoThe retailer either accepts swipes or not, ditto for your bank, the fact that there is a fall back feature if chip fails isn't a security failure unless it opens up a new avenue. (Someone could just print a magic strip unless one or both blocked mag strip charges)
- pbh101 8y agoAt some retailers lights will flash around both the swipe slot and the chip slot on the machine when it is time to pay, but I’ve experimented with swiping a chip-enabled card and every time the machine immediately says ‘Insert Chip’. I think retailers still really want to accept swipes to prevent chip reliability issues from resulting in lost sales, but they also want to heavily prefer chip transactions because then they aren’t as liable in fraud cases. So perhaps they’ve bought credit card machines that have conditional-swipe failover for this.
- Guvante 8y agoIt is about processing fees IIRC. No way to avoid the fraud liability but you can get a lower cost per transaction by having chip and being certified to take payments through it (including some extra auditing)
- Karunamon 8y agoGiven how craptacular the terminals are here, not having the fallback would lead to a nontrivial amount of lost sales. (Sooo.. I can’t pay? Guess I have to abandon this cart of groceries and find a bank branch...) The chips also don’t seem to last as long as the magstripes for some reason (which makes zero sense when you think about it). I’ve had to get my card replaced 3x in the space of two years.
- michaelmrose 8y agoIn actual practice TONS of people ruin their chips or regularly run them while doing stupid things like holding onto the card and bending it slightly or pulling it out early. When it fails to go through because they couldn't follow directions or because its outright broken they keep using their cards for months or until they get a new one expecting the retailer to deal with their half broken credit instrument and complaining energetically if it doesn't work. Since a relatively small number of complaints ruins the parent companies perception of how well the individual store is doing as far as customer service the store level doesn't want anything to inconvenience their customers especially since literally 99.9999% of swipes are from legit customers not thieves.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoThere are still idiot retailers that won't support the chip for debit transactions. Or even stupider, some let you choose between credit or a debit after inserting to the chip reader and reject you for choosing debit.
- lostlogin 8y agoMag strips are often used by ATMs and machines that you stuff cards into for tickets (train, museum etc).m I don’t know why but I’ve never encountered an ATM that uses the chip. I’m an MRI radiographer with expertise in the area of mag strip erasure. Chips are fine though and work after repeated exposure to 3T magnets.
- pbh101 8y agoI’ve inferred that the newer ATMs I’ve encountered use chips: the card stays in the machine for the entire transaction and is released to you right before the cash is dispensed.
- eythian 8y agoI don't think I've ever used an ATM that doesn't do this since I started using them some time in the late 90's, even when the cards had magstripe and the chip was a twinkle in a beach's eye.
- lostlogin 8y agoPbh101 and eythian - where in the world are you? I’m in New Zealand usually and France currently and I’ll pay attention in the U.K. next week. I’d love the strip to be redundant.
- eythian 8y agoFrom NZ, now in NL. In both places, the card is virtually always ingested into the machine, and only released as the second-last step (before you get the cash.)