It’s a local news chestnut: Crooks are stealing debit card PINs from ATMs and gas pumps! Your card could be next! But in these days of complex fraud-alert algorithms, RFID scanners, and embedded chips, shouldn’t we be hearing this story less often? Why aren’t ATM-debit cards more secure?

Well, they are secure. Just not in the US. When our current card-reader infrastructure was installed in the 1980s, we already had a robust telecom system that allowed for fast communications between machines and banks. As a result, our cards could be low tech. In Europe, however, lack of connectivity created time lags that made it easy for crooks to commit fraudulent transactions without anyone noticing. So in the 1990s, European countries began upgrading their hardware to support cards with chips that told the machines, “I’m legit!” They leapfrogged us. So did criminal technology. Now we’re the world’s debit-card backwater.

Why don’t we upgrade? Because we have a convoluted infrastructure of companies and individuals that would have to join forces and agree to spend lots of money. First come the merchants. They’re already angry about the high fees they have to pay for terminals and processing. Next are the companies that sold them the machines. These middlemen are also in charge of the electronic processing (when you swipe your card, they call your bank and ask if it’s OK). Then there are the card firms, like Visa and MasterCard, and, finally, the thousands of banks and financial institutions, who nod at the middlemen and reap the profits.

“An upgrade would cost billions of dollars, and they would all have to agree,” says Mike Urban, senior director of fraud solutions at FICO. “For a chip-and-PIN system to come to the US, we’d need a government mandate.”

And there’s another reason: Federal law mitigates consumer responsibility for electronic payment fraud. In 2009, financial institutions picked up 57 percent of the $1.36 billion lost to debit-card fraud (merchants ate the rest). The banks are fine with this, since they more than compensate with high ATM fees. Legal limits on fees could prod them into pushing for a more secure system, but proposals for such restrictions have always died in Congress—as they did again during debate over financial reform legislation last year.