It seems like there’s a cyber-hack story in the headlines every other day. But while merchants—and even the Internal Revenue Service—crack down on digital breaches, thieves are targeting another source of power: automatic teller machines.
That is spurring a broad movement to more secure methods of payment.Crooks are stealing credit and debit card data from U.S. ATMs at the highest rate in 20 years, according to recent data from credit scoring firm FICO, and they don’t seem to be slowing down.
Year over year, card skimming, in which thieves swipe user data, at bank-owned ATMs is up a dramatic 174 percent. At non-bank ATMs, compromises are up 317 percent. These numbers represent successful incidents.
As predicted in previous Mercator Advisory Group research, fraudsters are ramping up their nefarious deeds in anticipation of an increase of the availability, and use, of EMV cards in the U.S. This phenomenon, with crooks increasing their hacking and skimming activities on mag stripe-equipped cards before they are replaced with more secure EMV chip cards, has occurred in virtually every global market transitioning to chip cards. This is why many of today’s banks and credit unions are accelerating their efforts to get EMV cards in the hands of their customers and members as soon as reasonably possible.
Overview by Ed O’Brien, Director, Banking Channels Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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