Visa: Chip Cards Reduce Counterfeit Fraud By 87 Pct.

Visa announced that since their inception, chip cards have reduced counterfeit fraud by 87 percent.

“Chip cards are increasingly becoming the norm as usage and acceptance has continued to grow since the EMV standard was first introduced in 2011,” the company said. “That’s good news for everyone but fraudsters. The latest data shows that Visa payment cards with an embedded EMV chip has had a significant impact on counterfeit fraud, which is when criminals copy your payment card data onto a fake card and re-use it without your permission.”

Visa uses the same technology in contactless cards that it uses in chip cards, as well. Counterfeit fraud dollars for all U.S. merchants dropped too, from the period of September 2015 to March 2019. Also down were overall card-present fraud rates.

Chip cards are now accepted at more than 3.7 million merchants, whereas in September of 2015 that number was only 392,000. That’s an 825 percent increase.

The number of active Visa chip cards is up significantly: from 159 million in September of 2015 to 521 million in June of this year. That’s a 227 percent increase, and 72 percent of Visa credit and debit cards have chips.

They’re becoming increasingly more common. In fact, 99 percent of all U.S. payment volume in June was done on EMV cards.

Recently, Visa also introduced three new tools to fight back against fraud: Visa Vital Signs, Visa Account Attack Intelligence and Visa Payment Threat Lab and eCommerce Threat Disruption.

RL Prasad, SVP of payment system risk at Visa, said it’s important to stay ahead of hackers.

Hackers, he noted, are only getting smarter about leveraging data tools to improve the subtlety and reach of their attacks, and these new tools give Visa customers the ability to see, isolate and stop fraud before it has a chance to scale across issuers and retailers.

“We still have the edge,” Prasad said, “because we have better access to data, at scale, than they do.”