Sam’s Club to offer credit card with chip to prevent counterfeiters

Sam’s Club is rolling out a credit card with a microchip to prevent fraud, the first major retailer to switch to a more secure payment card after hackers made off with a trove of private customer data at Target Corp. last year.

The warehouse retailer, which is owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., said the MasterCard credit cards will be available this month.

“Each credit card has an embedded chip that makes the card more difficult to duplicate,” Sam’s Club said in a Wednesday statement.

The chip-enabled cards, which are more secure than ones with magnetic strips, is the latest effort in the retail industry to offer more secure forms of payment after the Target data breach jeopardized the personal information of as many as 110 million customers.

Target said in April that is was speeding up its switch to chip-and-pin technology on its branded payment cards and also in stores.

That kind of technnology is already common in Europe and other countries to prevent counterfeiters and thieves. However, retailers in the U.S. have been slow to adopt it.

Chris McWilton, president of MasterCard in North America, called Sam’s Club “a trailblazer” in pushing for more secure payment cards.

The retailer will “help drive chip-enabled technology forward here in the U.S. as it gains more traction,” he said in a statement.