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Comment by ZoFreX | Hacker News Reader

So, in the UK I very rarely use the magstripe on my card - 99.9% of transactions I do are chip & pin.

The chip on my card broke recently, and I found out that it doesn't even work in ATMs any more. Does that mean ATMs are only looking at the chip? If I blank my magstripe with a magnet, will I have made my card skim-proof while retaining ATM capabilities?

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Chip ATMs will generally only look for the chip and therefore work with the stripe missing. (Many ATMs have two slots, one chip and one stripe) So in most of EU you should be perfectly fine if you remove or otherwise disable the magstripe on your card.

You'll be screwed though if you end up in a situation where your chip doesn't work and need to pay with the stripe fallback (pretty much all cards allow this).

Many companies in the UK now don't allow you to pay with the stripe fallback. Even those that do, the employees often don't know how to put the till in that mode. Found this all out the hard way!

Annoyingly I only have the one card and I'm travelling to the US at the end of the month, otherwise I'd give this a go and report back!

Unfortunately, it doesn't even matter. If the reader detects that you have a chip card, you cannot use the magstripe even if your chip is faulty. The error you will get, after swiping the card, entering the amount and then pressing enter waiting for confirmation will be "PLEASE INSERT CARD". Quite vague but that's exactly what you get.

I do not know of any readers that won't let you bypass this. Many terminals have a button that literally says "bypass PIN" that'll let you use the stripe in case the chip fails.

Interesting. I was using my chip card in a country where chip cards were not really well known till last year. Surprisingly they already had chip-ready readers for easily two years before now so I have personally experienced the part where the cashier is completely baffled with the face of "I've never encountered this error before". Then, I have to operate the terminal, and insert my card (again) and press enter. I do not remember seeing any way to bypass it. I would have loved to do that because by this time it'd already be in my wallet and I cba to remove it again.

I don't know about the UK, but in France highway toll booths only look at the magstripe (the automated booths, where you don't have to input a pin - the manned booths use chip & pin).

That's how I discovered that my card's magstripe was faulty (and being stuck in the automated booth on a busy highway is not a comfortable way to discover that).

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