US credit-card fraud not reduced by security chips

The adoption of security chips has not slowed credit card fraud, considering 60,000,000 US credit cards being compromised in the past 12 months.

Out of the 60,000,000 credit cards amount, 90% of them were chip-enabled. The majority of the compromised cards were stolen by infected point-of-sale terminals. The findings come from a Gemini Advisory report, which argues a lack of chip compliance in merchants for the rise.

The proprietary Gemini Advisory telemetry data, collected from various dark-web sources over several years, determined that in the past 12 months at least 60 million US cards were compromised. Out of those, 75%, representing 45.8 million, were CP records, likely compromised through card-sniffing and point-of-sale (POS) breaches of businesses, such as Saks, Lord & Taylor, Jason’s Deli, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, Forever 21, and Whole Foods. Moreover, 90%, meaning 41.6 million of those records, were EMV chip-enabled.

The shift in Card-Not-Present (CNP) fraud is growing, taking into account a 14% increase in payment cards compromised through ecommerce breaches. Payment card data that was stolen from Orbitz, Ticketmaster, City of Goodyear, and British Airways represented only a small part of the 14.2 million CNP records posted for sale in the past 12 months.