by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
Have you noticed a charge on one of your cards that you can’t explain? If so, you may be a victim of one of the “tap-to-pay” terminals that are being installed all over the nation. The television commercials that promote RFID technology that allows us to pay just by tapping a card are designed to make us feel warm and fuzzy about this new method of conducting transactions, but it turns out that this technology is not nearly as secure as most of us thought. The industry insists that cards with these new chips can only be detected four inches away from the terminal, but there have been numerous cases where cards are literally being charged “from across the room”…
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Panicked shoppers claim they have been charged for purchases while their credit cards were still in their pockets after in-store tap-to-pay systems read them from across the room.
Several customers have raised the alarm about the glitch which is said to have occurred across stores, restaurants and even a doctor’s office.
One woman said she was at least ‘two feet away’ from the reader when it managed to scan her card information and process a payment.
The local ABC News affiliate in San Francisco interviewed one victim named Edgar Mathews who says that he was billed for his groceries without ever pulling a card out of his wallet…
Mathews was trying to use his debit card to pay for groceries at Safeway — but that never happened.
“I hadn’t tapped it, I hadn’t inserted it, I hadn’t swiped it… and then all of a sudden, out comes a receipt. And I said, ‘How did this get paid for?’” said Mathews.
The cashier couldn’t explain it.
According to the industry, this should never happen.
When Mathews checked his accounts, he discovered that the terminal at Safeway had actually charged a Bank of America credit card that was in his back pocket…
Mathews checked his bank accounts. Turns out, the “tap-to-pay” card reader at Safeway had ignored the debit card in his hand. Instead, it reached into Mathews’s back pocket, through his wallet and charged his Bank of America credit card tucked inside!
The news outlet also interviewed another local resident named Sonya Cesari.
According to her, a tap-to-pay terminal at one store actually read three credit cards that were “tucked in a wallet inside her purse”…
“Three days later at a boutique in Yountville,” said Cesari. She got an even bigger surprise at a little shop.
“The woman said, ‘Oh my, it’s just read three cards,’” said Cesari.
The store’s “tap-to-pay” system charged not only one, but three credit cards tucked in a wallet inside her purse.
Unfortunately, this is a problem that is not going to go away any time soon.
More tap-to-pay terminals are being put in with each passing day, and more tap-to-pay cards are constantly being issued.
So people are going to continue to be charged by mistake.
In some cases victims are actually being charged for goods that someone else is trying to purchase. Just check out the following example which was recently posted on Facebook…
Of course this sort of technology is going to make it even easier for hackers and scammers to steal from the general population.
Credit cards and debit cards are both extremely vulnerable, and criminals have a variety of methods that they can use to extract the information that they need…
Have you ever thought about how woefully insecure credit and debit cards are? Try this experiment: Plug a USB magnetic strip reader into a computer, open a word processor, swipe a credit card, and boom—you just stole your own card information. It’s that easy.
Now consider that the same technology comes in faster and smaller forms. Tiny “skimmers” can be attached to ATMs and payment terminals to pilfer your data from the card’s magnetic strip (called a “magstripe”). Even smaller “shimmers” are shimmed into card readers to attack the chips on newer cards. There’s now also a digital version called e-skimming, pilfering data from payment websites.
So what can we do to protect ourselves?
There are sleeves that you can get to protect your cards, and there are entire wallets that are designed to block RFID signals.
And it is imperative to always be diligent.
It has been said that “complacency is a killer”, and that is so true.
Try to avoid using ATM machines as much as possible, and if you are making payment at a gas station or some other highly vulnerable location always look for signs that something is out of place.
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