State Attorney General George Jepsen and eight of his peers from other states sent a letter Monday to major credit-card providers urging them to speed up their move away from outdated magnetic strip technology.
Credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Bank of America have already begun issuing credit cards with computer chips in them — a more secure way to store data than a strip. The EMV Migration Forum estimated that there will be 600 million chip-based cards in circulation in the U.S. by year’s end.
But the AGs say they want credit-card companies to combine the chips with personal identification numbers, or PINs, for added security. They said most chip cards issued in the U.S. rely on the customer signature, rather than a PIN, as a secondary form of verification.
“We know, based on experiences in other countries, that chip and PIN cards offer greater security to consumers — security that I believe far outweighs any initial burden or confusion that always comes when we need to get used to a new way of doing things, like using a credit card,” Jepsen said in a statement.
Jepsen’s office received more than 40 breach notifications a month in the most recent fiscal year. Nearly half of those breaches involved compromised credit and debit cards.
Congress has not mandated that card issuers switch to chip technology, but on Oct. 1, a rule change took effect that affects liability if a credit-card system is breached. Between the merchant and the card issuer, whoever hasn’t upgraded their respective system — chips for issuer and new card readers for merchants — will be liable for fraud costs.
All New England AGs, except New Hampshire’s, signed the letter, as did attorney generals in Illinois, New York, Washington and Washington, D.C.
The National Retail Federation praised the letter’s urging of chip-and-pin technology, saying “U.S. consumers deserve nothing less.”
