Originally Posted by
dweeblethorpe
I was in a small shop in London last month and the sales clerk refused to accept my Visa after noticing the lack of chip. The explanation was that the company's insurance company would not cover them for fraudulent card use for non-chip cards.
Europe has a serious organized crime problem. It because so prevalent that Visa and Mastercard needed the chip to keep clerks from skimming card numbers. To entice merchants into using the new technology they stopped covering fraudulent swipe transactions. I wouldn't be surprised if liability insurance plans followed that.
Long and short of is, more crime in the EU, coupled with a lot of post WWII data collection laws that generally keep the credit card companies from running the same kinds of sophisticated anti-fraud profiling programs we have in the US.