A man from UK is going head to head with banking corporation Halifax next week in court after he filed a case against them for the loss of £2,100 (US$3,100) from his account.

Alain Job, a Cameroonian immigrant, had realized that someone else had withdrawn the money from his bank account, but maintains that his card was always with him and that he was not the one who made the withdrawal. Job then decided to sue the bank over this mystery withdrawal, making it the first legal case to challenge what bank claim to be an extremely secure security system designed specifically to protect against card fraud. The hearing for Job’s case will be in Nottingham County Court on April 30.

 This case has raised doubts on the effectiveness of the chip-and-PIN system that has been introduced in Europe years ago to stem rampant card fraud. In this system, instead of using a signature to verify each transaction, the cardholder must enter a four-digit PIN which the cash machine or POS terminal compares with the data stored in the microchip embedded within the card

Ross Anderson is a professor of security engineering at Cambridge and a very vocal critic of the currently implemented chip-and-PIN system. He and other security researchers have outlined potential holes in the system which could have been exploited to gain access to Job’s account.

While cash machines have verification mechanisms checking the microchip used to make sure the card has not been cloned, the microchip can sometimes be bypassed and data can be read off the magnetic strip in certain machines.

 All-access “yes” cards may also be created to transact with machines with the ability to authorize transactions on its own, without connecting to the bank. It is also possible to obtain a key off a chip that can certify transactions to identify the card as legitimate even though it has been faked

 Halifax insists that it has evidence that Job accessed his own account with his card but would not release details. Anderson on the other hand, believes that banking companies place too much faith in the system and is trying to shift the losses of fraud away from the bank.