Chip and pin machine fraud: Customers to blame?

Recently the banks have adopted a nasty approach the chip and pin fraud. Banks are started to turn down fraud claims instead of reimbursing customers, claiming that the customers must have left a note in their wallet with the PIN number written on it!

There are numerous reports in the media of customers having their cards stolen, and thieves withdrawing money with stolen cards in an ATM machine or a chip and pin machine soon afterwards. Whilst it is likely that many customers do stupidly leave their PIN details in the same place as their cards, I sense that something else is going on.

The banks claim that chip and pin cards are impossible to hack - they say you cannot get the PIN number off a chip and pin card. Whilst some claims are reimbursed where they bank reckons it is reasonable that the PIN number was observed, they often refuse to believe this.

The internet is packed with stories of secret ways of getting the PIN number off the card using high technology - but the banks don't credit most thieves with those sort of resources. If the bank says that you must be lying and have left the PIN with the card, there is not much you can do. Banks support the thieves and not the poor customer.

I take a slightly different view here. Chip and pin machines, ATMS and the cards themselves are all technology, and as we all know, technology can go wrong. Computers are only as clever as the person who programmed them, so what is to say that a clever person cannot devise a way of getting the PIN number off the card. Even if this was easy, the banks would either ridicule or suppress such information.

Do not forget that the PIN is on the card. Chip and pin machines do not go off to a distant computer system to check the pin number, the PIN number is there on the card. Although the card has clever systems to prevent somebody trying to extract the PIN, who says it is impossible? It would not surprise me if there was a way. However, the banks have a terribly old fashioned attitude to this, they just say it can't be done, and it must be the customers fault - inferring that the banks are perfect and the customers are flawed. Whilst the banks do no know how it can be done, why can't they acknowledge that it might be possible... if they did that, there would be outrage and a total lack of confidence in the chip and pin system.

The banks could still do more, but avoid out and out chaos. Why can't they tell us customers what they are doing to prevent PIN systems from being hacked? IF the banks respond to claims of chip and pin fraud by telling us how they regularly use a team of independent technologists from different fields to hack into chip and pin cards, and the results of such tests, I'd feel a lot happier.

Once again, the banks do what they like to the poor customers. Chip and pin isn't perfect, and the banks could do more to help peoples confidence and get the press on their side instead of making daft claims that something is impossible, when clearly, something is wrong.