Credit Cards With EMV Chips Will Reduce Fraudulent Purchasers And Counterfeit ATM Cards

Financial institutions that allow customers to use credit cards always strive to provide ultimate security. A week a go I had a crazy experience with Co-operative Bank. Apparently, I had forgotten my signature mainly because I opened my account five years ago. Well, in 2010 I didn’t have a personal signature.

Ironically, I never used the counter to withdraw cash. My ATM did all the withdrawing. I think that played a big role in slashing off the signature from my memory. Sadly, my ATM card got lost, so I was forced to come up with another signature. To make matters worse, I had to do all the signing in my domicile bank – so I had to go all the way to Kakamega. I obliged and planned a trip home. The essence was to protect my money from me. They thought I was a hardcore thief. Weird right?

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Well, thanks to technology things will be easier. Credit cards will have a chip that will protect consumers. The tech has already been rolled out in the US where all credit cards and debit cards will have a built-in chip. The chips are called EMV (EuroPay, MasterCard and Visa.) Cnet reports they will create a one-time-use code needed for each purchase, which makes stolen card numbers less valuable on the black market.

In the US, retailers have been ordered to set up new payment terminals that can read the EMV chips. On the other hand, ATMs and gas pumps will face the same liabilities in 2017. Ideally, the move is to reduce the number of counterfeit cards floating in the streets.

There are many ways hackers can steal private information. They can use card skimmers to read a card’s magnetic stripe at an ATM or gas pump. They can also penetrate retailers’ corporate information systems to copy card numbers. Those stolen numbers can be used on fake cards to make fraudulent purchases. Two-thirds of fraudulent purchases inside stores are made with counterfeit cards, said Stephanie Ericksen, Visa’s vice president of risk products.

How will the EMV chips help? The chips send encrypted one-time codes for each transaction, the cards are harder for fraudsters to read and duplicate, experts say.

Also read:Ugandan Banks risk cyber attacks due to lack of Microsoft Windows 7

In online payments, a test was done by Kaspersky Lab. The result was fascinating. They found many users do not know basic security rules when making online payments or using online banking systems. For example, only half of users check if a website is authentic before entering their financial details, while almost a third consider it completely unnecessary to take any measures to protect their money online. However, Kaspersky Fraud Prevention platform allows banks to protect financial data and prevent fraud even if users are careless when dealing with money online.

 

 

 

Erick Vateta564 Posts

--- Erick Vateta is a lawyer by training, poet, script and creative writer by talent, a model, and tech enthusiast. He covers International tech trends, data security and cyber attacks.

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