In the US skimming of mag-stripe is still surprisingly/sadly common.
Most(?) store gift cards don’t have chips. I think some smaller banks may not have chips on debit cards. I don’t know about “food stamp” cards or gas station branded cards.
So as a thief you can collect what you can get. Plus you can screw up the EMV slot so people must swipe, making them vulnerable (if they don’t use contactless).
> you can screw up the EMV slot so people must swipe
I think that outside of USA most banks would configure their systems to automatically decline any transaction from a chip-capable terminal for a chip-capable card (to prevent cloned cards from being used with just the mag-stripe data), so swiping would be possible only on terminals that never had a EMV slot in the first place, and IIRC even that is limited to certain regions as in many countries it's expected that all terminals must be chip-capable; a damaged EMV slot should result in the bank returning an error code effectively saying 'broken terminal, repair or use another' instead of permitting to swipe.
Alternatively, I think I have seen contracts (for merchants who really wanted to keep swipes longer than the expected transition) that say that any fraudulent swiped transactions are fully paid for by the merchant.
It definitely took the US a long time to get started, but I think once it got started it's nudged along at a reasonable pace. RFID pay at least is growing a lot faster than chip pay did previously.
Most(?) store gift cards don’t have chips. I think some smaller banks may not have chips on debit cards. I don’t know about “food stamp” cards or gas station branded cards.
So as a thief you can collect what you can get. Plus you can screw up the EMV slot so people must swipe, making them vulnerable (if they don’t use contactless).