andrewNZ:

richms: I've had my chip card not work in a few dodgey places recently and the machine request a swipe. Always seemed dodgey. One was maccas at wairau in the drive thru. Another was bok mart in Mt eden and another was the Kwik e mart at auckland hospital.

Since my debit cards magnetic stripe is unreadable I ended paying with money rather than using my barely working old yellow swipe only eftpos card.

My understanding of this is that the machines can actually go offline and still take payments, but can't use the chips to do it. once it goes online again, it processes the transactions. I believe there's an agreement that the banks will honour transactions up to a certain value regardless.

Kyanar:

andrewNZ:

richms: I've had my chip card not work in a few dodgey places recently and the machine request a swipe. Always seemed dodgey. One was maccas at wairau in the drive thru. Another was bok mart in Mt eden and another was the Kwik e mart at auckland hospital.

Since my debit cards magnetic stripe is unreadable I ended paying with money rather than using my barely working old yellow swipe only eftpos card.

My understanding of this is that the machines can actually go offline and still take payments, but can't use the chips to do it. once it goes online again, it processes the transactions. I believe there's an agreement that the banks will honour transactions up to a certain value regardless.

Yup, EOV.  And if all else fails, then the merchant can record the details on (!!!) paper and submit paper vouchers to their provider as well.

Fred99: There's something that I don't get about the original post.
Presumably, the skimmer sets up hardware stripe reading skimmer and camera (to capture PIN), or malware infected POS terminal. They need access to the POS site (I hope - as if they can do it remotely - then we're in serious trouble)
The banks clearly have systems in place - to intercept unusual transactions and block the card - such as happened. In that case - it wouldn't be hard to identify, and the bank is liable for losses over $50 (in NZ?), so surely they'd err on the side of safety - to protect their own interests.
The skimmers can't be complete fools - they have to plan and set it up. So why would they used skimmed card data for transactions bound to fail? Avoiding detection for as long as possible would be in their interests - so wouldn't discrete use, overnight, to withdraw cash from EFTPOS bank terminals close to the geographic location where the cards were skimmed be the way to go?

This thread kind of bothers me. I'm determined now not to use my EFTPOS only swipe cards, but chipped credit cards with PIN only, plug-in rather than swipe, and hyper-vigilant about protecting my PIN. But in the case of a malware infected terminal, can they extract enough data to produce a fake Eftpos swipe card to access other accounts linked to on the chipped card?

Fred99: There's something that I don't get about the original post.
Presumably, the skimmer sets up hardware stripe reading skimmer and camera (to capture PIN), or malware infected POS terminal. They need access to the POS site (I hope - as if they can do it remotely - then we're in serious trouble)

tardtasticx:
edit: Also, I would assume the scammers would have multiple fake cards to try at once. One is bound to work eventually, as the bank won't pick up 100% of those cases, as evident by a previous poster about his account being drained in India.

sbiddle: Word on the street is a massive compromise involving all banks. It'll be very interesting to see where this goes in two to three weeks time when somebody in the media finally picks up on it...

AidanS: Is it safe to say that cards with "insert chips" in them, are safe from this skimming activity?

Or do I just have a false sense of security?

If anyone knows for sure, that'd be great :)

-A.