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Their defense essentially places the onus on their processor (JPMorgam Chase) to employ "risk mitigation" techniques we all admonish PayPal for.

I guess the question is this: why not use smartcards or RFID? Other countries have for years. Why not in the US?



Chase wouldn't be the one processing skimmed transactions, anyhow - it would be any merchant or processor the thief could find with weak fraud controls. In the US, ultimate liability for fraud is usually with the wronged merchant.

You know why Paypal lost a hundred million in fraud? One way was because they were the weakest link at the time: Paypal got used for cashing. (The hardest, riskiest part of stealing credit cards: transforming a credit card number into hard currency, without getting arrested. There are any number of ways to do this: buy items with a high resale value on eBay, pay with Psypal backed by stolen cards, sell items for cash. Set up affiliate account with merchant of high margin item, put sham transactions through using Paypal account backed by stolen cards, withdrawal clean money from affiliate account to which no accessible link to Paypal accounts exist. etc, etc)

Smart cards/RFID are basically worthless for preventing card not present fraud, which is the lion's share of it.


I know it's an innocent typo, but I love the idea of Psypal. That's when they use psychics for fraud detection.


It's not Square's defence. It's every merchants'/processors' defence.

I have a card with information stored on a magnetic strip, a smart card, RFID and text. It doesn't matter which of these you use to steal the information, the result is the same.


Yeah, but if the costumers are cautious to always use the chip instead of the magnetic strip it's much more difficult for criminals to steal the info without the owner noticing it.


Risk mitigation is probably mostly done by Square and JP Morgan/Chase stands behind it.




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