In recent years, implementing a chip in credit and debit cards has become almost universal, as most card companies now feature the element in their new cards.

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According to the 2017 Identity Fraud Study, more than 107 billion dollars has been stolen from consumers nationwide in the last 6 years alone. In December, 2013, hackers stole credit and debit card information from nearly 40 million Target customers along with the names and e-mail addresses of 70 million more. The incident prompted Target to make a change to their store-branded credit cards, switching to the use of chip and PIN technology. Visa and Mastercard eventually announced similar plans with hopes of completely switching from magnetic strips to chip and PIN by October 2015.

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The chip and PIN credit cards represent a significant technological advancement towards fighting identity theft. Instead of having cardholder information stored in a magnetic strip, the information is held within a small chip attached to the card. The idea behind the chip and PIN technology is advanced security, as the chip and PIN cards use cryptography methods, encoding and decoding of information and messages, to protect data during communication with a card reader.

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“Swipe and sign” soon will no longer apply, as the “insert and wait” feature is now used by nearly all retailers: inserting the card into a chip reader and using a four-digit PIN code rather than a signature. With the introduction of this new technology, many retailers switched immediately, or were in the process.

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The process is seen as faster and easier to many. Along with the introduction of the technical transition came a wave of opinions in the favor of ultimate security, although this may not necessarily be the case.

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"The customer's name, their account number, expiration date and all is still transmitted," said Craig Shearman, Vice President of Government Affairs Public Relations for the National Retail Federation, according to fox45now.com. "There's no difference in the chances of your data being hacked by using a chip card versus a magnetic strip card," he continued. "The encrypted code only says that the card itself is a legitimate card, not a counterfeit card.”

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Although the federal trade commission reported a 27 percent decrease in fraud once the chip cards were used from 2015 to 2016, "The chip cards are an improvement over what we had in the past, but they don't go nearly far enough," said Shearman, according to fox45now.com.

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The chip and PIN cards have helped cut down the creation of fake cards, a form of counterfeiting when thieves with access to card numbers simply transfer the numbers to a different piece of plastic. The new technology makes this form of counterfeiting hard, but as quickly as merchants find a way to control one form of thievery, thieves find a new way to steal, according to AARP. “Fraud is kind of like squeezing Jell-O,” said Stephen Coggeshall, chief analytics and science officer at LifeLock. “Stop it one place, and it migrates to somewhere else.”

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The real issue behind credit card theft may not even lay in the form of card communication, as stealing credit card information is as easy as swiping a card in any skimmer device. "When the magnetic stripe was created, identity theft wasn't an issue. And so the data was never properly encrypted," said Robert Siciliano, a cyber-crime expert, according to ABC News. Skimmer devices are often times discovered on ATM machines where they collect the credit card information from each card swiped. In many instances, a small camera is also used in order to record the cardholder’s PIN. Even with the added protection of a chip, credit card fraud is still possible according to Siciliano. "Skimming is still alive and well, and it will continue to be alive and well as long as that magnetic stripe is still on the back of our cards.”

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The popularity of non bank credit cards exploded in the 1970s, and credit card theft has been a steady issue since the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the introduction of the chip and PIN system may be a positive step towards ceasing the issue, it still has a ways to go.