The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: mystery-ak on February 08, 2014, 03:11:45 pm
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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-sign-swipe-credit-cards-145220287.html (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-sign-swipe-credit-cards-145220287.html)
All American Credit Cards Will Disappear In 2015 And Be Replaced With This New Tech
Business Insider
By Jim Edwards February 7, 2014 9:52 AM
These credit cards are dinosaurs.
Every credit card in the U.S. will be replaced by October 2015 with new cards that contain the chip-and-PIN technology that the rest of the world has had for years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Both Visa and MasterCard are committed to the switch, which will render extinct the plastic in your wallets and purses right now.
No more black magnetic stripes; no more signing on the dotted line.
Americans who have traveled to Europe in recent years will know that the U.S.'s credit card system is embarrassingly old-fashioned by comparison. It's often difficult to use American credit cards abroad because the Europeans abandoned magnetic stripes and signatures years ago — they were too easily hacked. Credit and debit cards in the U.S. are about 10 years behind the rest of the world.
The new cards contain a microchip and require the owner to enter a PIN into a payment machine at checkout.
They are more secure for a couple of reasons.
First, requiring the PIN prevents checkout staff from handling your card — they will simply hand you the point-of-sale device and customers will insert their cards and verify payment themselves. Currently, when a checkout staffer takes your card, they can surreptitiously swipe it through a card-copying machine, or simply copy the number on it. A version of this hack was used to steal 70 million credit card numbers from Target customers between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Hackers altered the point-of-sale machines to copy the info on the magnetic stripe as it was swiped. With chip-and-PIN, the number on the chip alone is useless — you need the PIN too, and that can be changed any time.
Second, the chip replaces the magnetic stripe, which is easily copied and therefore vulnerable to hackers, as the Target sting proved. In France, chip-and-PIN allegedly reduced credit-card fraud by 80% (although the sourcing for this number is vague).
In fact, the reason the U.S. is being forced into making the chip-and-PIN change now is that the fraud industry migrated from Europe to America simply because U.S. cards were easier to hack than the European ones, according to MasterCard’s Carolyn Balfany, the company’s expert on the change.
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I remember when the USA was at the cutting edge of technology and everything new happened here first. Now we are laggards behind the rest of the world. In most other industrialized societies you can buy a soft drink from a vending machine simply by pointing your cell phone at it. Here, you still have to put in the money and half the time the machine spits it back.
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Just last year here locally, a couple of guys were busted for installing a device on gas pumps that copied the magnetic strip info as you inserted the card in the pump.
I just wonder what it will cost us to implement this...you know the banks will pass on the costs...
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Just last year here locally, a couple of guys were busted for installing a device on gas pumps that copied the magnetic strip info as you inserted the card in the pump.
I just wonder what it will cost us to implement this...you know the banks will pass on the costs...
On a semi-related note, it was not too long ago that the credit card companies and the retailers found out that they could indeed pass the processing fees onto consumers as a surcharge; they historically have not. That meant that a grocery store had to charge the same for cash and card, even though the card incurred more expenses— thus driving up the cost for everybody.
My question is this: I worked in retail long enough to know that the main reason people use the insecure credit "swipe and sign" method is precisely because they didn't want to, or simply could not, remember their PIN. (The other is that debit transaction fees, which already use the PIN, typically get charged to the consumer, not the store.) Is it possible (nay, probable) that we have stuck to it longer than Europe because we PREFER not having that security? It is, after all, a bit of a pain in the keester.
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I'll also say this: it will take longer than 18 months for this new technology to reach every corner of the country and, like canada, we'll probably have a period of years where both will still be in use.
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Weird. I'm so used to chip and PIN that it never even occurred to me that you guys didn't have it yet.
It does have it's advantages, as the article points out, and anyone who can't remember a 4 digit number shouldn't be allowed out without a keeper in the first place.
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Just last year here locally, a couple of guys were busted for installing a device on gas pumps that copied the magnetic strip info as you inserted the card in the pump.
I just wonder what it will cost us to implement this...you know the banks will pass on the costs...
A pair were just arrested about 2 months ago for doing the same thing to a number of LIRR ticket machines (Long Island Rail Road).
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Weird. I'm so used to chip and PIN that it never even occurred to me that you guys didn't have it yet.
It does have it's advantages, as the article points out, and anyone who can't remember a 4 digit number shouldn't be allowed out without a keeper in the first place.
For one card, sure. But remember, many Americans have several debit/credit cards, each of which have their own code. Get them mixed up too many times and the card locks.
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Weird. I'm so used to chip and PIN that it never even occurred to me that you guys didn't have it yet.
It does have it's advantages, as the article points out, and anyone who can't remember a 4 digit number shouldn't be allowed out without a keeper in the first place.
Will you be my keeper? :laugh:
I use my debit card as "credit" for precisely that reason. Can't remember the damn PIN #
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Will you be my keeper? :laugh:
I use my debit card as "credit" for precisely that reason. Can't remember the damn PIN #
:laugh:
Do have a fix. Put your pin on your cell phone. Pick a name you associate with the bank, and make a bogus phone number. Last 4 digits are your PIN. You can whip out your phone and check while you are waiting in line to pay.
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:laugh:
Do have a fix. Put your pin on your cell phone. Pick a name you associate with the bank, and make a bogus phone number. Last 4 digits are your PIN. You can whip out your phone and check while you are waiting in line to pay.
Oooh! I like that! That is a very ingenious solution - at least so long as you have your phone about you - and does help to overcome the problem of having to have a different password for every different security measure one has to deal with.
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The beauty of it is, someone looking at their phone is the norm rather than the exception now, and the name you associate with the particular bank is entirely random and depends solely on your own mind.
For example - my main bank is Barclays. That is coded in as Clark. Not something you could guess easily.
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The beauty of it is, someone looking at their phone is the norm rather than the exception now, and the name you associate with the particular bank is entirely random and depends solely on your own mind.
For example - my main bank is Barclays. That is coded in as Clark. Not something you could guess easily.
could also be clay's bar.
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I just tried to chase the association chain for that, just for fun.
Barclays Bank.
They have a SA subsidiary called Barclay de zot Weld.
The last apartheid president was F W de Klerk.
Convert it to English - Clark.
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I just tried to chase the association chain for that, just for fun.
Barclays Bank.
They have a SA subsidiary called Barclay de zot Weld.
The last apartheid president was F W de Klerk.
Convert it to English - Clark.
Too far for me!
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Weird. I'm so used to chip and PIN that it never even occurred to me that you guys didn't have it yet.
It does have it's advantages, as the article points out, and anyone who can't remember a 4 digit number shouldn't be allowed out without a keeper in the first place.
ummm, I can't remember a 4 digit number :tongue2:
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Not a bad idea..