[cplease]

True, but the story is about glitches with Citigroup USA. pokstad is referring to Costco Citi cards in the USA. Some USA issues will allow you to SET a pin on chipcards (rarely by default), but they are not REQUIRED at the POS by any retailers in the USA. None will, because that's not the industry agreement standard and would lock out the majority of consumers. The adoption has been a giant clusterfuck. Most retailers are still taking stripe only. It's the weakest link. Until retailers stop accepting stripes and chip + signature, there's no need to steal the PIN.

Hell, it's 2016 and I'm still encountering retailers who end up having to key in the card, or in a couple of cases still do offline processing with manual carbon-slip imprints.

Our shitty American cards affect the rest of the world too. Traveling to Europe over the past decade+ until 2015 I apologize for my unexpectedly chipless card everywhere I went (never had much trouble using it though); same with Canada up to present. They all have chip+PIN, but our cards go through without and spit out a receipt with a signature line.