I never understood this any way but I recently came across a scammer that mentioned when they dump a card (steal the information from someone else’s debit card and put it onto a created debit card) and go to a store and the cashier asks them to do a chip that they’ll intentionally make it decline twice so they’ll have to swipe. That happens to me often with certain cards when I’m in stores. My question is, what is the difference in this context? Like how are they so different that swiping works better than the chip? I’ve seen this a lot also where chips don’t work for a lot of people. But what is the real difference (especially in this context)? Thanks.
In: Technology
The magnetic strip stores the card data in an unencrypted form. You can swipe it on any reader and read it out then load a new card with the data.
The chips don’t work like that. They are a little microprocessor on the card. Only the bank/credit card company can talk to it via cryptographic challenge-response protocol. Once the chip and the bank authenticate, the transaction can go through.
Latest Answers