Criminals Fraud Were For Tons Of EMV Credit Cards

Criminals are in a very smart way managed to defraud for tons of credit cards that are equipped with an EMV chip. The EMV chip is the successor to the magnetic strip and make it harder for criminals to defraud, for example through the skimming of debit cards.

However, the chip is also not immune to attacks, according to research (pdf) by French researchers that Wired notified.Four years ago, a dozen credit cards stolen in France, which were then used in Belgium. Something that would be impossible without the PIN of the card holders. This led to police investigations and finally the arrest of several gang members.

The research that followed and which the researchers used X-rays revealed that the criminals had made a second chip in the EMV chip of the stolen credit cards. Through this chip, they could bypass the authentication of the PIN code, since any PIN you entered was accepted. In addition, the criminals took advantage of the fact that the authentication of the PIN code then was disconnected from the transaction authentication of EMV payment cards.

Transaction

A normal EMV transaction consists of three steps. Authentication payment, verification of the cardholder and finally the authorization of the transaction. During the transaction if the original chip on the custom payment simply responding to the authentication control. The verification of the cardholder asked the payment to the user's PIN. The criminal then filled in an arbitrary code.

At that time, the applied chip was active and the ticket said that the PIN was correct, which accepted it. During the last transaction authorization gave the second chip, the data between the terminal and the first original chip. In this way, managed to steal the gang for about 600,000 euros with the custom cards. Eventually, the criminals ran into trouble because they always used the stolen credit cards on the same spots.