Originally Posted by
motytrah
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.
I can't comment on whether there is more credit card fraud in Europe than other parts of the world, but most card issuers in the UK have very sophisticated anti-fraud programs - I have had a Visa card cloned twice in recent years and on both occasions my card issuer detected the "out of the norm" transactions straight away and shut the card down. On other purchases, I have had phone calls from the card company to check that transactions were genuine - this is from both US-based issuers (MBNA) and UK ones.