📋 Criminals Target Bank Card Chips in Scam (AARP Article)

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FROM THE ARTICLE - SEE ARTICLE FOR MORE!!!

Chip Card Scam Turns Security Feature Into Security Risk.

Your bank will never ask to ‘secure your account’ by taking the protective chip on your bank card.

By Matt Alderton, AARP. Published October 11, 2024.

Whether you use it to buy groceries, gas or clothing, you probably swipe your credit or debit card multiple times a day at payment terminals. These EMV cards, as they’re known, have a small computer chip in the corner that you insert or “dip” into payment terminals. That chip is meant to make your transactions more secure than they were in the days when we used to swipe our card’s magnetic stripe through payment terminals. The chip, for one, makes it far more difficult for criminals to produce counterfeit cards.

But after nearly a decade of watching consumers dip rather than swipe (chip cards were introduced in 2015), scammers have realized that they don’t have to duplicate EMV cards in order to hack them. They just need to steal the chips — and, unfortunately, they’ve figured out a way to convince people to hand them over.

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2024/bank-card-chip.html