Last week, my bank sent me new debit cards that I didn’t request or want. Ours weren’t set to expire until late next year, but these were forced upon us by our bank and replaced our existing cards. Why would they incur the extra expense of sending out replacement cards for cards that didn’t need replacing? So they could add RFID chips to them!
Now I have these “touchless” cards that I believe are nothing but trouble waiting to happen. I don’t see how it’s any more convenient to tap my card against a reader and signing a receipt instead of quickly swiping it and entering my PIN, but that’s beside the point. I only use my debit card for PIN transactions anyway, so I’m going to see no benefit by possessing this card. In fact, the chances are this card could someday cause me nothing but pain.
You see, since all you have to do is get near one of these cards with a reader to access it, there is nothing stopping someone from loading up a reader in a purse and brushing past me to read every chipped card in my wallet. Likewise, there is nothing to stop someone from hiding a “skimmer” near the legitimate pad to siphon away my information. And with a powerful antenna, it’s even possible for the subversive individual to be nowhere near me to read my cards.
But that’s only the half of it!
When these cards are eventually replaced, you will cut these up just like you do any other expired card. But now, you’ll have to take care to cut through the chip hidden somewhere inside your card, otherwise a clever fellow could potentially steal even more useful information than if you had left an unshredded statement in the garbage – and he wouldn’t even have to dig through it. It is not obvious where the chip is on my card, so I had to go searching for it. After scouring over it and holding it to different angles of light, I finally found a slight rectangular imperfection in the plastic, leading me to believe that is where the chip resides. You can bet that is the first place that will be attacked by my scissors when this card is put to pasture.
Be careful with this new technology. It doesn’t take much today to steal your credit card information – just wait what it will be like when the criminals have built their own readers and casually walk around the mall to collect the data off of hundreds or thousands of active cards in a single trip. Call me paranoid if you wish, but I think I may be contacting my bank about deactivating these chips or going back to unchipped cards. I rather appreciate the “inconvenience” of being forced to present my card for withdrawl instead of entrusting it to the airwaves around me.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I haven’t heard of these yet… so thanks for letting me know about them! You make some good points about people being able to steal info or money easily – but I have to think that banks would have thought about this ahead of time… there has to be some security in place to stop that from happening – doesn’t there?
I thought the same things you did. I also have concerns about my new passport which is chipped. Supposedly these chips and the readers go through a complicated “handshake” and only submit encrypted data back and forth, but I still can’t believe that it would be impossible to impersonate a valid point of sale system.
I read about one researcher who was able to clone a passport in just a couple weeks after they were released…. Doesn’t seem like it would be hard to do the same to these chipped cards.