Warning: Protect your RFID debit cards!
If you follow my blog over at Merchant911 you’ve read about the concerns over the security of RFID cards. RFID has been around a while in the form of SpeedPass at Exxon-Mobile stations and the technology has been used for years for door access and the like. It’s currently being used in passports. The technology has already been proven to be unsafe. In fact, it is so not safe that the government has standards for protecting them.
The credit card industry continues to ignore the evidence.
In a recent appearance with the North Carolina Crime Prevention Association, I devoted an entire segment of my three-hour card fraud prevention presentation to these things. They are proven to be easily readable without the cardholder ever removing them from their wallet or purse. Among other things, I showed them this video and this one.
Last week I got an email from a trusted Merchant911 member relating personal knowledge of one of these incidents.
One of our office managers recently received two new debit / credit cards, no pin required for credit purchases, with the chips embedded. She activated them, and, before she even got to use them one time, they were scanned while in her purse and both accounts were cleaned out – to the tune of more than $20K.
Chase worked with her, issued new cards, and gave her back the money after she filed a police report and proved the purchases were not made by her – in fact they were made in another state. She had to borrow money from friends to buy groceries and put gas in her cars and stop her direct deposit until they resolved the problem.
And then there’s this one.
We were in a local grocery store chain in Chicago and a gentlemen was trying to use his debit card to swipe the payment system to pay for his groceries, but kept getting frustrated when the newly updated payment system insisted on reading his MasterCard – still in his wallet, also newly issued by Chase.
The clerk at the register said they had experienced about 30 such incidents since they updated payment terminals a few days earlier.
In both of these cases the access to the card information was unauthorized and unwarranted.
Recognize an RFID “Smart Card”
So the question you ask is, “How do I know if I have one of these cards?” And the answer is simple. On Visa cards look for the word “Blink” and on MasterCards look for “SpeedPass.” Don’t just look on the front. The Visa card that I received recently had the word “Blink” in small letters on the back.
Also, you might see a logo similar to one of these:
Protect your card
Protection against someone passing a reader near you and grabbing the information is easier than you might think. You could, of course, purchase one of the commercial products on the market from companies like Identity Stronghold or Yellow Jacket Products but if you don’t really want to spend a few dollars, you can make a card-sized folder out of thin cardboard, wrap it in aluminum foil and keep your cards in that.
What’s important for you to know is that they can be, and have been, read while still in the wallet or purse of an unsuspecting victim. Don’t let yourself be one of them.
