FBI Notice Warning Consumers To Use PINs With EMV Cards Is Gone

A public service announcement the FBI posted Thursday warning consumers that the new EMV chip cards “are vulnerable to exploitation by fraudsters” and urging them to enter a PIN instead of a signature during EMV credit card transactions was removed Friday, apparently at the behest of the leading banker trade group.

The PSA on the government’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Web site came just a week after the U.S. EMV liability shift took effect. With it, the FBI, apparently unwittingly, put itself in the middle of an ongoing controversy between bankers and retailers over cardholder authentication with the new chip cards that are replacing magnetic-stripe payment cards.

Bankers support signatures with EMV credit card transactions, saying the chip, which generates a one-time cryptogram with each transaction, provides strong security, and they also say consumers are used to signing with credit transactions but not using PINs. But fraud-weary retailers want PIN authentication not only with EMV debit cards, as is traditional, but also with chip credit cards.

The FBI’s PSA, which was addressed to police, merchants, and consumers, reviewed the security advantages of EMV cards over mag-stripe cards, but still urged consumers to enter PINs when making point-of-sale purchases.

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