I recently traveled to London for a few days without any cash or coin. I brought my United States (US)-issued debit card and a couple of US-issued credit cards and tapped them around the city, no signature or PIN required. Sometimes, I used embedded payments through apps. Not once did I swipe a magstripe-enabled card.
That's because the United Kingdom (UK) began migrating to EMV chip-card technology in 2002. In 2007, the UK started issuing EMV chip cards for contactless and mobile tapping payments. No PIN required. No magstripe included.
Magstripe information is received in the clear by the card reader and can be easily intercepted for cloning. Mastercard and Visa organized EMVCo in 1999 to combat card-present fraud across the globe. Migration to EMV chip-card technology was intended to lower card-present fraud, especially counterfeit fraud.
Fumiko Hayashi, a payments economist at the Kansas City Fed, has been tracking the effect of EMV technology since its introduction. Recently, in "Did Card-Present Fraud Rates Decline in the United States After the Migration to Chip Cards?
" she found that even though counterfeit fraud rates of debit cards used with a PIN have been trending down, debit card fraud rates are trending up when used without a PIN.
I blame the magstripe for these findings. Magstripes are still on every card in the US. Although harder with the EMV-chip dip, every swipe could potentially be skimmed and cloned to counterfeit. Unfortunately, I can't prove my theory with data. Therefore, I concur with the article's conclusion, that more research is needed to understand why counterfeit, lost-or-stolen, and overall card-present fraud rates have not declined in the US.
While I was in London, I visited with researchers at UK Finance, a trade association responsible for collecting and analyzing payments data for the UK. Its latest Fraud Report 
states that in 2022 "cases of counterfeit cards have fallen to the lowest levels ever reported due to the success of Chip and PIN." Chip and PIN: all good. But, I think the report left out another source of the decline in counterfeits— the lack of magstripes.
I believe growing use of contactless payments, and removal of magstripes will likely make a huge dent in counterfeit cards. However, then we must talk about lost and stolen card fraud. Stay tuned for more on that topic.
By Jessica Washington, AAP, assistant vice president, Atlanta Fed Payments Forum