Science Forums 2

[Freethinker]

Smart Cards are more involved than the mag swipe type cards. The data is stored on a chip encapsulated into the card. They are not used much in the US, but are very common in the rest of the world. The amount of data that can be stored on Smart Cards is growing quickly (like all such technologies)

Swipe cards store just user ID info and once swiped on a machine, it connects to a remote server for all data and transactions.

A Smart Card can actually store data and do transactions in itself. e.g. a dollar amount can be loaded into the card and when spent, the running total is kept on the card. Where regular swipe cards, all the requests and cash movement is done at some remote server.

Smart Cards took off in Europe because the crooks there were more clever. By taking a card writer, an exact copy can be made of a swipe card on the spot. That's what they were doing in Europe, but not in the US. In the US fraud was usually just manually copying the card number or stealing the card itself. So there was not the incentive to invest in the additional card reader technology in the US.