Comment by Guvante
8 years ago
The retailer either accepts swipes or not, ditto for your bank, the fact that there is a fall back feature if chip fails isn't a security failure unless it opens up a new avenue. (Someone could just print a magic strip unless one or both blocked mag strip charges)
At some retailers lights will flash around both the swipe slot and the chip slot on the machine when it is time to pay, but I’ve experimented with swiping a chip-enabled card and every time the machine immediately says ‘Insert Chip’. I think retailers still really want to accept swipes to prevent chip reliability issues from resulting in lost sales, but they also want to heavily prefer chip transactions because then they aren’t as liable in fraud cases. So perhaps they’ve bought credit card machines that have conditional-swipe failover for this.
It is about processing fees IIRC. No way to avoid the fraud liability but you can get a lower cost per transaction by having chip and being certified to take payments through it (including some extra auditing)