Identity Theft - Electronic Pickpocketing
The scams over the years seem to be ones that replay themselves over and over, almost on a rotating basis: illegal foreign lotteries, gypsy/traveler home repairs, magazine sales, refinancing loans, people portraying themselves as debt collectors, fraudulent charities and grandparent scams that play on your emotions and sympathy. The one scam that seems to be prevalent every day though is still identity theft, which according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) still ranks as the number one complaint reported in 2009 and affected 278,078 victims.
After a news station in Memphis did a story on potential risks of posed “contactless” credit/debit/ATM cards containing embedded RFID (radio frequency identification), it seems that electronic pickpocketing is getting a lot of attention these days.
RFID chips can be found in passports and some credit cards. These chips could be encoded with basic information such as account numbers, expiration dates, names, and/or dates of birth on them. As reported by the Memphis news station, “the extent to which this activity might be used to facilitate theft is currently difficult to gauge. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) has stated “that they’ve never seen a case of RFID skimming used to steal information”. Since most victims of identity theft don’t know how their identity was stolen in the first place, statistical reports of electronic pickpocketing may not exist.
Analysts have stated that they believe card skimming in this manner may not be as much of a threat as some reports have made it sound. The reason for this is that they believe that the data streams that are emitted by contactless cards don’t include information such as PIN’s and the card verification value (CVV) security codes. Newer cards are reported not to even contain the customer’s name on the chip. Without these vital pieces of information, a card skimmer should not be able to use the information stolen from the card to create a fake credit card or to even use it online where a customer is not present.
Other analysts state that card skimming devices generally work when a victim only carries a single contactless card. When carrying multiples of these type of cards, the transmission creates a jumbled, unintelligible data stream. While original RFID enabled cards transmitted information in plain text, technology has created new contactless cards with encryption to the data that is streamed, thus making them unreadable by ordinary card readers.
So what does this all mean for you? That totally depends on your views and interpretation of this information. You may either rest assured that credit card companies are doing everything they need to do to keep the information on your credit card that you carry in your back pocket or purse safe, or you may feel more comfortable about purchasing a secure sleeve that shields the RFID signals from being transmitted to an electronic thief.
