Tesco hits back in chip and PIN row

Concerns that Tesco's self-service checkouts and petrol pumps represent an opportunity for card fraudsters have been dismissed by the supermarket giant.

These terminals are not chip and PIN enabled and do not require a signature below a certain payment amount.

Consumer group Which? said it had been contacted by "several angry people who found themselves hundreds of pounds out of pocket after crooks copied their cards and used them at these tills".

Which? said its researchers found it easy to buy goods using someone else's card at a Tesco superstore in London - without any procedure to prove identity or ownership of the card.

But in a statement Tesco said: "Fraud levels at our self-service checkouts and petrol pumps are very low and no higher than at our main checkouts, which have full chip and PIN."

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Tesco's self-service tills have limits on spending and the number of times a card can be used in a day. Shop assistants are also trained to spot suspicious behaviour at sales terminals, the retailer said.

The retail giant said chip and PIN technology was not fully established when it first installed its self-service terminals more than two years ago. The terminals therefore used the old payment method of scanning the card.

Tesco is aiming to switch the self-service terminals at 320 locations over to chip and PIN by December this year, it said.

As of August, out of 900,000 face to face point of sale terminals in the UK around 50,000 were still not chip and PIN enabled, according to Apacs, the UK trade association for payments.