Verified by Visa is bad for the consumer: it shifts all the risk of fraud onto them. If the PIN is intercepted, and subsequent purchases are made with that PIN, the owner of the card is liable for all of those purchases; they are considered to have made them because their pin was present at the time of purchase.
That's generally been the case in Europe, but as I understand it this "liability shift" would be more difficult to enact in the U.S., because U.S. law has blanket limits on consumer liability for credit-card fraud (maximum $50 for card-present transactions and $0 for card-not-present). There are exceptions if the bank can show that you were negligent, e.g. you knew a card was stolen but failed to report it in a timely manner, but the burden of proof remains on the bank in those cases.
