Not A News Flash: Payment Fraud Will Explode During EMV Rollouts

PCI Council Chief Bob Russo expects EMV to help security in the longterm. In the short term? Not so much.

“These hackers [will] take advantage of, at least in the face-to-face environment, getting this credit card data,” Russo said, according to a report in BankInfoSecurity. “As we saw in other, mature EMV markets, typically the fraud is going to go up before EMV becomes embedded here in the United States. So, get prepared, for fraud is coming, and it’s coming very, very strongly.”

The story pointed out that even over the long term, EMV does little to reduce E-Commerce fraud as the added security from the EMV chip isn’t applicable for almost all E-Commerce sites.

In his speech, Russo also cast a skeptical note about the U.S. government’s decision last week to require more EMV use for government accounts. He said that he doubted it would help much.

“With a sarcastic tone in his voice, he said: ‘Did anyone see the executive order being signed? Fraud’s finished. Come on, what do we have to talk about here?'”