The dangers of contactless cards

Would you let a stranger go on a shopping spree with your bank card?

With a contactless bank card, you’re making it easier for criminals to steal your details and make payments with your card.

Did you know that one in four card payments have now gone contactless? This totals more than £3.3 billion being circulated this way every month.

Let’s delve into this technology a little more.

What is contactless technology?

According to Oxford dictionaries, the definition of contactless (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/contactless) is:

“Relating to or involving technologies that allow a smart card, mobile phone, etc. to contact wirelessly to an electronic reader, typically in order to make a payment.”

This method allows anyone to make a payment without additional authentication. It makes paying faster and easier and has been implemented in many high street retailers, restaurants and supermarkets.

When using contactless cards to make payments, the upper limit on single purchases is £30. However, there is no restriction to the amount of individual transactions you can make in the day.

It is no wonder its usage has overtaken chip and pin payments. An analysis done by Worldpay shows that the use of contactless cards has risen by 30% from 2017 to 2018. This makes it the most popular form of payment method for in-store transactions.

Contactless card payments sound great right?

However it is not as secure as you may think and comes with a few major negatives that most people are unaware of, read on to find out more below.

The dangers of contactless

Since its introduction, there has been a surge in fraud. The ease of contactless makes stealing your money an easy job. Watch this video and see for yourself:

Watch to see how easy it is to defraud a contactless payment card

As you could see in the video above, you only need to be within 5cm of a POS reader for a payment to be transferred over.

This could potentially mean you may not even notice someone trying to make a payment with your card as they could be standing behind you in the line or walking past you.

The dangers then become more severe when thieves are able to bypass the limit. An experiment done by Which? shows that they were able to use the stolen card information, in combination with a fake name and address, to steal a £3,000 TV from a mainstream online shop.

It is not just a one off occurrence. Contactless payment fraud has been occurring everyday at an incredibly fast rate. In fact, almost £27 is being stolen every minute.

According to UK finance, contactless card fraud has overtaken cheque fraud (£5.3m annually), reaching £5.6m a year. Almost doubling from £2.9m in the first six months of 2016.