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Taiwan boasts little fraud

Despite frequent reports about credit card fraud, Visa International yesterday said that Taiwan had the lowest fraud level in the Asia-Pacific region last year, thanks to concerted efforts on the part of its members, law enforcers and industry participants, company executives said.

Four-year low

At 0.04 percent of purchases, the fraud rate of Visa credit cards and debit cards fell to a four-year low last year, compared with the average fraud rate of 0.07 percent in the Asia-Pacific region and 0.09 percent globally, said Peter Maher, Visa Asia Pacific's general manager for risk management, at a press conference yesterday.

Maher was visiting Taiwan to present awards to the National Credit Card Center (聯合信用卡處理中心) for its commitment to improving risk management performance.

In 2000, however, Taiwanese credit card holders often felt jittery when making payments, as the fraud level stood at 0.34 percent that year -- triple the regional average at the time.

Visa attributed Taiwan's significant improvement in countering credit card fraud to a combination of working with law enforcement authorities, introducing security systems and pushing for chip-embedded cards, said Christopher Clark, Visa International's manager in Taiwan.

Cards planted with EMV chips can significantly reduce losses from skimming or copying the contents of any card's magnetic strip.

EMV is an abbreviation referring to the integrated circuit card specifications issued by Europay International, MasterCard International and Visa.

As one of four Asia-Pacific markets with a national chip card migration program underway, Taiwan has issued 3 million Visa chip cards as of December last year, creating 2 million transactions per month, Clark said.

Best protection

"As EMV migration [upgrading] nears completion, cardholders can be assured that Taiwan now has the best long-term protection against counterfeiting or fraud," Maher said.

To reduce fraud, the Cabinet-level Financial Supervisory Commission has instructed banking institutions to replace traditional magnetic-strip cash-withdrawal cards with chip-embedded cards. So far, up to 78 percent of all cards have been replaced, the commission's statistics said.
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