OT. Credit Card Hacked, Skimmed in the U.K.

[Home Guy]

The president of Paypal had his credit card hacked.
Article here: http://tinyurl.com/lq67sso (USA Today)

The skimmer pulled the data from the magnetic strip.

Someone in the US can't actually use a chip and PIN card
without a strip now, right?

Here in Canada, my Avion Visa-Infinite card (with $14k credit limit)
that I got about 4 years ago has a chip - and mag strip.

I don't think I've used it anywhere in the past year that didn't have a
chip-reader.

All chip-reader terminals have mag-swipe capability - for when the
connection to the chip fails and you have to resort to swiping the
card. This failure happens consistently at some vendors. For example,
there's one particular checkout lane at a local Home Despot that
constantly fails to connect to the chip on my card.

Pretty much all gas pumps are converted to chip-readers. When you
insert the card, you hear a small click and the card is physically
locked in the mechanism until the transaction is completed. As with all
chip transactions, you enter a 4-digit pin and the transaction
proceeds. No signature required (not that any signature was ever
required at gas pumps).

[Dean Hoffman]

Post by Home Guy
Pretty much all gas pumps are converted to chip-readers. When you
insert the card, you hear a small click and the card is physically
locked in the mechanism until the transaction is completed. As with all
chip transactions, you enter a 4-digit pin and the transaction
proceeds. No signature required (not that any signature was ever
required at gas pumps).

Some of the gas pumps here in the central U.S. require one to
punch in the postal zip code of the card's owner.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Pretty much all gas pumps are converted to chip-readers. When you
insert the card, you hear a small click and the card is physically
locked in the mechanism until the transaction is completed. As with all
chip transactions, you enter a 4-digit pin and the transaction
proceeds. No signature required (not that any signature was ever
required at gas pumps).

Some of the gas pumps here in the central U.S. require one to punch in
the postal zip code of the card's owner.

Most of the time I've had to do that for the past several months, but
one gas station where I filled up recently did not require it.

Perce

[Home Guy]

Post by Dean Hoffman
Some of the gas pumps here in the central U.S. require one to
punch in the postal zip code of the card's owner.

Using either my current Visa card (with chip) and previous Visa (without
chip) in the US going back at least 6 years, I can't remember a time
when I'd use the cards at a US gas pump and NOT be asked to punch in a
zip code. Which never worked because they didn't seem to have a method
for converting a 6-digit alpha-numeric postal code into a 5-digit zip
code. So I always ended up paying inside.