CREDIT CARD COMPANIES ARE FORCING EVERYONE TO USE “SMART” CREDIT CARDS IN THEIR WAR AGAINST CASH

Published: July 30, 2015

Payment-processing giants like MasterCard and Visa insist that you and your financial data will be safer once you move to “smart” credit cards that contain a computer chip.

And like it or not, credit card companies are forcing merchants to make the change.

After an Oct. 1, 2015, deadline created by major U.S. credit card issuers MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express, the liability for card-present fraud will shift to whichever party is the least EMV-compliant in a fraudulent transaction.

In other words credit card companies are FORCING merchants to make the change or they’ll have to pay for every fraudulent purchase!

The new “smart” credit card rules are forcing banks to also hold you accountable for any fraudulent purchases!

You read that right, banks can blame the customer if they feel you might have been negligent.

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, which is shorthand for bank owned digital currency.

“Approximately 120 million Americans have already received an EMV chip card and that number is projected to reach nearly 600 million by the end of 2015, according to Smart Card Alliance estimates.”

A Fortune magazine interview with Carolyn Balfany MasterCard’s SVP of U.S. product delivery for EMV’s revealed this bombshell:

The ultimate would be no card at all, right?

Where I just use my phone for everything.

“But is every demographic, is every person, ready for that? When we think about acceptance, we wouldn’t ever want to take a step back on acceptance. We want to make sure we are adding acceptance constantly to further our war on cash Carolyn Balfany said.”

Not to be outdone, Citigroup claims only criminals use cash:

Citigroup’s Chief Economist Willem Buiter claims …”even though hard evidence is hard to come by, it is very likely that the underground economy and the criminal community are among the heaviest users of currency.”

Evidence is hard to come by?

In other words there is none and he’s full of s***!

Chris Skinner, author of The Future of Banking and Digital Bank wants to do away with currency:

“Imagine that your payment mechanism is built into a watch that your bank gave you. The watch includes an RFID or NFC capability, biometric recognition and is supported by existing infrastructures at the merchant front-end and money transmissions process back-end. The retail consumer can therefore go into any store, wave their watch at the contactless terminal, press their finger to the pay point and they have purchased the goods. No card or cash involved.”

“That is the vision of the future of retail payments and we are almost there today. We already have contactless payment terminals, fingerprint recognition payments, micro and mobile payments. The only logical step is to introduce non-card based (i.e. biometric-based) payment systems.”

There it is in black and white, THE WAR ON CASH IS REAL and credit card companies are hard at work trying to destroy currency!

Back to EMV’s; just how secure are “smart” credit cards? According to recent studies EVM “smart” cards are vulnerable to hacking.

Norton Security says that this year 70% of credit cards will be vulnerable to digital pick pocketing.

Researchers have proven “smart” cards are more vulnerable to hacking than banks want you to know:

“I would walk up to you and I might stand like this on the train, Ok and boom, I have your credit card,” said David Bryan.

Bryan, a security specialist at Chicago’s Trustwave, used a device in his backpack to read account numbers and expiration dates – all from cards which I think are safely tucked away in my wallet.

“They have everything in just a few seconds,” Bryan said.

“The card sends data back to the device, right. So that means it’s wireless, so if it’s wireless, it can be read through clothing.”

“The equipment is easily found online but only works on cards with this wireless symbol or cards enabled with “Radio Frequency ID” , “Near Field Communications”, “Blink” or “Paypass” technology.

As you can see, the device only has to get within 6 inches of the card.

‘The technology is high-frequency RFID,’ Mr Bryan said.

‘It uses 13.56 Mhz to communicate with the card and the reader.

‘In this instance, I used low power Embedded Linux Computer, and an easily purchasable RFID reader.

Researchers at a recent “blackhat conference” revealed more vulnerabilities:

“With just a mobile phone we created a POS terminal that could read a card through a wallet,” Martin Emms, lead researcher of the project said.

“All the checks are carried out on the card rather than the terminal so at the point of transaction, there is nothing to raise suspicions. By pre-setting the amount you want to transfer, you can bump your mobile against someone’s pocket or swipe your phone over a wallet left on a table and approve a transaction.”

Transactions took less than a second to be approved.

“This lends itself to multiple attackers across the world collecting small transactions of perhaps €200 at a time for a central rogue merchant who could be located anywhere in the world,” Emms notes.

“This previously undocumented flaw around foreign currency, combined with the lack of POS terminal authentication and the ease of skimming contactless credit cards, makes the system more vulnerable to high-value attacks.”

Click here to read the “Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack” report.

EMV credit card terminals are also vulnerable to being hacked:

Two security researchers showed how easily criminals could take control of a shop owner’s credit card terminals — even if the shop uses the latest chip-and-PIN machines.

Those terminals are supposed to be safe, because they encrypt your PIN as you type it and don’t store your credit card’s data. But MWR Labs researchers found that a hacker could easily tell the machines to do the opposite.

Hacking the terminals is virtually undetectable. Turning the machine off erases all evidence that the hack ever even happened.

Keep this in mind when banks have FORCED everyone to use EMV “smart” credit cards.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Credit_card_companies_are_forcing_everyone_to_use_%22smart%22_credit_cards_in_their_war_against_cash/45348/0/38/38/Y/M.htm