According to a payment industry representative, it will be impossible for cyber criminals to counterfeit cryptographic chip enabled credit and debit cards. However, the chip will not be able to stop payment card fraud.
While testifying at a House Financial Services Committee hearing, Stephen Orfei, general manager at PCI Security Standards Council, said “the new EMV chips will pretty much end the use of counterfeit cards to make in-store fraudulent transactions — but it isn’t a silver bullet against payment card fraud. Once that [in-store] environment is secure, fraud will then move to the card-not-present environment.”
However, reps from the retail industry argued that hackers will “focus all their energy” on breaking the protection of the EMV chip. Brian Dodge, executive vice president of the Retail Industry Leaders Association testified in favor of “requiring consumers to enter a PIN for every transaction they undertake. We simply argue that one of the baseline factors of basic hygiene is two factor authentication.”