Credit card processing and the various methods

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Why is it sometimes you have to sign, sometimes pin, sometimes zip code, sometimes chip, sometimes swipe?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Old style was swipe and verify. Verification could be done with signing, pin, or zip. Still insecure as a scanner could read the magnetic info from the strip to create a duplicate card and use it. The person could easily make up a signature, and the vendor wouldn’t know it wasn’t yours until days afterward if at all.

Chip is the newer style and is more secure. So even if an unscrupulous person were to record the data exchanged during the transaction, it couldn’t be used for future transactions.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The method depends on the merchant and the devices they use to accept the payment. As of October 2017, all US merchants are required to accept the chip method because it is more secure. American tourists sometimes have trouble using non-chip cards in Europe because they made the conversion several years earlier.

My understanding is that the chips security comes from a sort of coded “transaction pin number” it generates for the next purchase. Basically this code is only able to be used once so hackers can only make one transaction before the card is flagged. This of course only applies to if the card is used as a chip card which is why there was a big push for everywhere to accept chip cards.