Money doesn't actually talk. We do.

The Future of Credit Card Fraud

Yesterday, I checked myself into a JetBlue flight by just waving my credit card under a nifty red scanner. Even after repeated check-ins like this, I still feel a brief rush of Star-Trek glee fused with not having to show my embarrassing 16-year-old mug to another disgruntled airline employee yet again.

The card’s seemingly magic properties come from its radio frequency ID tag (RFID). Other examples include EZ Passes, the new U.S. Passports and PayPass cards used in the New York subway system.

Enter personal finance. In this BoingBoing TV video, Xeni Jardin has her RFID-enabled American Express card hacked by a pro, Pablos Holman.

As the video points out, you don’t need to worry about this kind of credit card threat for a while. The paranoid among us could wrap cards in tin foil or use a stainless steel wallet (comfy!), but the takeaway is that RFID security has a scary future. “There are more and more ways to leak that information without knowing it,” Jardin says. To which the hacker Holman replies; “with a bigger antennae hooked to this, I can go into Starbucks and get the name of everybody there.”

As if the economy wasn’t hard enough to figure out, this is yet another thing that consumers shouldn’t have to deal with, but we do. Find out what kind of security protection the cards in your wallet have and don’t have and if necessary, demand more security from the card companies–you deserve it.Also–and this goes without saying–beware of any geeks who come near your derrière with one of those weird card reading devices.

-Mary Pilon