Chippy the Credit Card is a Fraud
The law now requires all banks and all retailers to have installed credit card chip readers. We have completed the conversion and credit card fraud is a thing of the past.
What? You don’t have chip cards yet? And, your favorite merchant has a chip reader but it hasn’t been enabled?
Welcome to America, the last major country to implement credit card Chips. Much of the world converted over a decade ago. The UK has been using them a dozen years. Much of Asia won’t even take a card with a magnetic stripe because their readers don’t have mag stripe readers.
To say America has been slow at adopting credit card chips is like saying America has slow cellular data (we’re now ranked #55 in the world.)
Well, don’t worry because the chip card probably really isn’t going to protect you after all.
The chip isn’t used for online transactions. Nobody has chip readers for their computers. And, online fraud is the fastest growing area of fraud.
And the chip readers aren’t going to help if your card is stolen. The rest of the world also requires a PIN so that if your card is stolen it can’t be used. But in America the banks chose not to implement the PIN.
You see, fraud is extremely profitable for banks. Extremely. When a credit card is fraudulently used the fraud is pushed to the merchant. The bank doesn’t eat any of the fraud. In fact, the bank makes 3% to 4% of the transaction. And, when the cardmember pushes back the transaction (claiming fraud) the merchant is charged $10 to $25 per transaction for having accepted a stolen credit card even though the merchant couldn’t have known it was stolen.
It has been estimated that banks make $100 Million in profit off credit card fraud.
So it is no wonder that you don’t have a chip card yet and you can’t really use it. Because even when you can, it’s not going to help very much.
VW sells cars that cheat on emissions. Banks profit by making fraud easier. What IS the world coming to?