are zero biometric ones. Further, the biometric technologies involved have high failure rates; EMV has well over 99 per cent uptime and even higher exactitude. Therefore it will be used and the biometrics won't, so a rational attacker won't worry about the biometrics unless they really have to. In fact, because of the false positive issue, the biometrics will be gainsaid by the EMV. Think about it. As a checker, you will with mathematical certainty encounter regular false positives. (You'll also encounter false negatives, but you won't know about them.) However, you will only very rarely encounter a real positive. Therefore, if a biometric check doesn't match, you will believe it to be a false alarm, and you will very probably ask the person presenting it to enter their PIN . Also, the government seems to have abandoned the idea of doing direct biometric-to-database checks and instead wants to authenticate a biometric held on the card to the user, like looking at the photograph on a passport. This means that it is much easier to fool anyway, because the card can be altered to match the user. But adding an additional "check" which is in fact easier to fake means that this is more likely to work. A fundamental problem with EMV is that there is no out-of-band verification of the transactions. You have to trust the card reader, and there is no obvious way of verifying it. Personally, I always turn it over and look under it because all