Chip Readers Help Cut Down On Credit Card Fraud

An officer with the Fond du Lac Police Department says the microchips in newer credit cards are helping cut down on credit card fraud. Officer Erik Foster says when they were first used in Europe credit card fraud was reduced by 10 percent and by the following year that type of fraud had been reduced by 80 percent. He says under a new law if the owner of a store such as a convenience store doesn’t have credit card machines with chip readers that owner could be held liable for any fraudulent charges made with a bogus card. He says credit cards with magnetic strips only have one set of numbers, but the new cards with chips in them get a whole new set of numbers each time they are used. The older cards with the magnetic strips are also easier to clone and the state saw some incidents where crooks put in their own scanners at gas pumps to read credit card numbers so they could duplicate them.