Credit Card Encryption

Each year, American consumers lose about $16 billion to identity theft and credit card fraud. Nothing like having to clean up your credit report after some hacker in a bunker somewhere in Eastern Europe cleans out your account.

Credit card companies have stepped up their game to reduce the probability of fraud by using credit card encryption, a process where a credit card terminal scans a card. There is then a process of transmitting customer information from the terminal to the backend of the network.

Encryption scrambles the purchaser’s data through an algorithm that makes the information unreadable without a key to unlock that data. The goal is to reduce to ability of a hacker to obtain consumers’ information.