Credit Card Skimming

Any place, Anytime.. You could be skimmed

Credit card skimming comes in many forms, but the latest is the scariest. Over the last few years with the introduction of contact-less RFID payment cards that you simply ‘Wave & Go’ your card near a payment terminal and your transaction is processed (no pin number required).

This convenience giving you the added benefit of speed and ease at the checkout has also come at a price. A new form of skimming crime as spawned know as wireless skimming or hi-tech highjacking, electronic pickpocketing or even RFID skimming to name a few of its given names.

Background

It’s time for you to secure your credit cards & passports before you become another identity theft statistic.

Do I really need credit card protection?

With the global roll-out of RFID enabled or ‘Tap & Go’ credit cards, there has never been a more prevalent time to start looking to protect your data from being skimmed.

Pay-wave-pass

If you own any cards with the following symbols:

MasterCard PayPass®*
VisaCard PayWave®*
Amex XpressPay®*

If your cards carry these symbols then your cards expresspaycarry a microchip and are RFID enabled. This RFID technology has its flaws and criminals exploit those vulnerabilities to skim your cards for fiscal gain or even contribute to profiling you for identity theft.

 

Don’t the banks cover me?

Are the financial institutions aware of the vulnerabilities?

You be the judge…!

We applaud the financial institutions for stepping up security, such as offering to cover any fiscal fraud# incurred by using the ‘Tap & Go’ payment facilities.

The banks limit the transaction amount to under $100 in most cases, again a good measure, but it also says to us:

We (the financial institutions) realise that there are vulnerabilities surrounding the adoption of this ‘tap & go’ or contact-less technology, but we have invested millions globally in rolling it out so as to minimise the concern of the customers we will limit the transaction amount and guarantee on the fiscal fraud incurred.

Background

If this technology was totally secure then why not allow the card user to make a larger purchase amount just like a normal credit card transaction.

It’s not JUST about the money, it’s your IDENTITY data

Do the banks give you a guarantee on protecting your data from being used for identity theft? I very much doubt it.

The banks and card issuers also employ encryption on all the data, which again is a great security measure by them, however if you do a Google search on RFID credit card hacking you will see articles from both security experts and the hacking community showing you how easy it is to hack the encryption on credit cards.*

The financial institutions also claim they add a unique transaction I.D. to every transmission for your protection, but again it is shown that all it takes is a hacker with a RFID reader (purchased off ebay for under $100) to program the device and undertake multiple ‘pings’ of the credit cards at one time. They then transmit this data live to another person who uses it to pump  your cards with that transaction ID attached to it

So instead of just $100 fraud, it can now be thousands of dollars using the multiple ‘ping’ hack to gain multiples of transaction Id’s. This can be perpetrated in seconds.

Its not just about the money! It is, more importantly, about the illegal acquisition of your personal identity data that is the risk to you!

Again, we must stress that the security measures undertaken by the organisations are useful, however we at Armourcard did not want to blindly leave our personal data to chance. Do you?

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