That's why I have no hesitation myself in making credit card purchases via the Web. However, there are so many hundreds of millions of cards in the U.S. that the cost for Visa or MasterCard to deploy smart cards is staggering, and they have no plans to do so in any big way. The only country where smart cards have been deployed on a widespread basis is France. I'm not holding my breath for this to happen in this country anytime soon. And so the credit card infrastructure in the U.S. remains leaky as a sieve.
Fraud is significant, and the industry simply lives with it as a cost of doing business.
On-line fraud is an infinitesimally tiny part of the overall picture. Here are some recent items from other sources that may be of interest. Rutkowski's reply was that net experts view the risk of sending a credit card number unencrypted over the Internet as no greater than giving it over the telephone. Open Market Inc. While it is theoretically possible to intercept Internet packets and discover an individual's credit card number, it's much easier to copy them off of discarded carbons. In the last week, for example, I handed my credit card to a waiter who disappeared with it for five minutes.