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Financial fraud falls in the UK following smart card roll out
3 Dec 2010

There have been fewer instances of financial fraud in the UK following the introduction of Chip and PIN smart cards, it has been revealed.

In 2004, British banks began replacing the old magnetic stripe cards with these new cards in order to improve the security of card transactions.

By the end of 2005, more than 107 million of the 141.6 million bank cards in the UK had been upgraded to incorporate the new technology.

Research carried out by staff at the University of Strathclyde has found that levels of plastic card fraud fell by 13 per cent to £439.4 million in the same year.

Furthermore, as the smart cards became more prevalent in Britain during 2006, the total value of fraudulent transactions dropped again to £428 million.

Susan Burns and George Weir from the institute's Department of Computer and Information Sciences are co-authors of the report, they claimed fraud levels are still too high.

They wrote: "The introduction of smartcard technologies has reduced the incidence of card fraud in the UK, but there are still significant losses from fraudulent card use."