Gas stations are being targeted by what is believed to be a criminal ring using counterfeit Voyager cards to make large dollar purchases for fuel, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. These criminals are using the card inside and are convincing store personnel to use a false approval code, provided by the cardholder, to complete the sale, which will result in indisputable chargebacks. Store personnel should NEVER manually enter an approval code.
2020 is officially here. October 1, 2020, marks the date on which petroleum retailers will be held responsible for credit card fraud that takes place at fuel dispensers that are not equipped to handle EMV transactions. There are only 186 working days until the EMV liability shift and technician availability will diminish quickly.
By John Drechny, CEO, Merchant Advisory Group September 5, 2019
Visa announced that since their inception, chip cards have reduced counterfeit fraud by 87 percent.
On October 1, 2020, counterfeit fraud liability will shift to you, the merchant, when an EMV (chip) card is used at a fuel dispenser that only has the ability to read the card’s magnetic stripe and not the chip.
Today, this fraud is being covered by the issuing bank. On October 1, 2020, and after, issuing banks will no longer cover fraud-related costs that occur at a non-EMV compliant fuel dispenser.
Skimmers at gas pumps are a continuous threat and the use of skimmers by fraudsters to steal credit card information is on the rise.
To protect your sites and your consumers, consider doing the following on a daily basis:
1. Use security decals on all dispensers and inspect dispensers for tampering
2. Install unique locks on your dispensers
3. Monitor activity at the dispensers, especially those that are hardest to see from inside the store
Data released by Visa showed that counterfeit fraud ticked down at U.S. merchants by 75 percent from September 2015 to March 2018 as more storefronts started accepting chip cards.
To that end, Visa said that, as of its latest “Visa Chip Card Update,” as many as 67 percent of storefronts in the United States now accept chip cards.
The company further elaborated that counterfeit fraud dollars at all U.S. merchants slipped 46 percent.
Visa recently published a report revealing that US merchants that completed the chip upgrade have registered a whopping 66% decline counterfeit fraud in June 2017 compared to June 2015.
According to the report, more than 2.3 million merchants, or 55% of storefronts in the US, are currently accepting chip cards, a surge of 542% since the beginning of EMV migration in the country.
Skimmers at gas pumps are a growing threat and the use of skimmers by fraudsters to steal credit card information is on the rise.
With the three-year extension to update your dispensers with chip-card readers, card skimmers will continue to be a threat until at least October 2020 when liability shifts to the party that does not enable EMV during the fraudulent transaction.
To protect your sites and your consumers, consider doing the following on a daily basis: