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 stripe contains pretty much what’s printed on the card, just in a machine readable format. So it’s trivial to clone: read the data, write data to a new card, done. Cards can be bought on Amazon, a card printer capable of printing a decent looking bank logo on a blank card is also easy to have.
The chip is a tiny computer. It keeps secrets and doesn’t disclose them to the reader. The reader establishes an encrypted connection between the card and the bank, and the bank in the end approves or denies the transaction. The chip can’t be copied because it doesn’t tell the reader at any point any more than it strictly has to.
If you’re okay with doing chip only transactions you could just scrape off the band entirely, and that’ll make it impossible to clone the card.
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