Gas station liability shift

Gas station POS terminals are some of the most lucrative sources of stolen credit card information for thieves. It is considered to be low hanging fruit by security experts. Not only are they plentiful and in most cases open 24 hours a day, so a thief stopping by a 2 AM to place a skimmer will not look out of place, but they are also not as secure as they could be.

Merchants were given until October 2015 to install a new EMV card terminal to avoid a liability shift. Did you know that service stations were exempted from this and were given a deadline of October 2017 to change over?

Now it should be obvious that replacing a terminal in a gas pump is much more difficult that replacing the payment terminal hooked up by the cash register and then there is the sheer quantity that would need replacing. 2017 should have been enough time, right?

Well Visa thinks otherwise. In late 2016 they decided to push the deadline back until 2020. Why? Too many pumps had to be replaced in order to install the new technology. The EMV technology requires a different infrastructure for a gas pump and specialized technology needs to be installed with most. Some pumps are just not able to handle it and will have to be dug out and replaced. Now before you place all the blame on station owners who are dragging their feet there is also not a sufficient supply of compliant software and hardware available to ensure that the upgrade would have been completed in time. Some of these upgrades can cost in excess of $10,000 per pump, a costly proposition for sure and even costlier since that pump would have to be out of service for however long it took to install the new unit costing the owner revenue. Visa believes that all told $4 billion will be spent upgrading the pumps alone.

Visa claims that fuel pump skimming accounts for only 1.3% of all credit card fraud in the US. That may be about to change. As tougher countermeasures are put in place it is a safe bet that thieves will migrate to the easiest targets which are gas station payment terminals and guess what, they are. In August 2016 in Arizona more skimming attacks were recorded than in all of 2015. It is getting to the point where the skimming is becoming so common that customers are being secretly told not to use debit cards at the pumps as the skimmers are capable of also stealing the PIN information.