Why are chip cards safer than traditional cards?

A chip card is more secure than a standard magnetic stripe card because the chip is harder for fraudsters to copy. But chip cards are not all equally secure. Chip-and-PIN credit cards are more secure than chip-and-signature credit cards because it’s harder for someone to guess your PIN than to forge a signature.… read full answer

Still, chip cards are not completely secure. And their security advantage over magnetic stripe cards might not affect your wallet as much as you might think.

For starters, all of the major credit card issuers provide $0 fraud liability guarantees to their customers. That means you won’t have to pay for unauthorized transactions if a fraudster ever gets his or her hands on your account information.

Secondly, all chip cards currently have magnetic stripes. This is to prevent usability issues in the United States, where chip-enabled payment terminals are not fully rolled out yet. But it also introduces security vulnerabilities. Special encoding on a chip card’s magnetic stripe makes a copied version useless at a chip-enabled payment terminal, according to Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. However, that won’t necessarily be the case on a standard point of sale machine where your card is swiped.

With that being said, chip-and-PIN credit cards are the only credit cards with which you can expect to encounter no difficulties when traveling around the world. Not only will they work at offline payment terminals, but they’re also more familiar to foreign merchants, who might balk at swiping a magnetic stripe card.

Chip credit cards can be “hacked,” in the sense that a thief who inserts a “skimming” device into a credit card terminal can copy data from your credit card and later make a copy of the card. However, skimmers can only copy data from your card’s magnetic stripe, not its chip, which is much more encrypted. Therefore, any copy of your card will only have a magnetic stripe. That means criminals can’t use it any merchant that has a chip reader.… read full answer

EMV chip cards enabled with contactless technology could also be at risk of NFC skimming. A contactless card uses NFC (Near Field Communication), a secure wireless technology that allows data to transfer from a mobile device to a card reader at a short distance. Someone close enough to you could use a scanning device to intercept the NFC signal and steal the card’s information.

In general, chip cards are safer than cards that only have a magnetic stripe. When you insert, or “dip,” a chip card rather than swiping it, the card’s built-in microchip and other security measures make it far more difficult for fraudsters to copy the card’s sensitive information.

Yet despite the security that chips provide, all chip cards still come with magnetic stripes. They’re necessary because not all merchants have payment terminals that can process chips. If a merchant does not have a chip card reader, you’ll have to swipe the card. This deprives you of the extra security protections built into the chip and leads to a greater risk of fraud.

It’s also important to note that cards with chip-and-PIN technology are more secure than chip-and-signature credit cards, yet most U.S. chip cards still come with the latter. They require a signature for purchases instead of a four-digit PIN. So if someone steals your card, they can forge your signature and make purchases.

If your chip credit card is hacked, skimmed or stolen, all major issuers have a $0 fraud liability guarantee on all of their credit cards. That means you won’t have to pay for the fraudulent transactions.