CC safety

1492 wrote:
As mentioned, contact-less credit card transactions are about as safe as using the card's chip insertion method. They both use the same encrypted transaction technology generating a one-time token. Most of the RFID fraud concerns from contact-less credit cards have been debunked as myths.

Personally, I will always use touch credit transaction first, and only use the chip insertion method if not available.

Nope.

Not any safer than using the mag stripe..

Skimmers have gotten significantly better over the last few yrs..

Here is a couple of recent examples found at Sam's clubs self checkouts in my county and a few other counties near me..





Those skimmers were slid down over a rather popular card reader brand which does have chip reader plus mag stripe and from what has been said was completely undetectable.

The skimmers transmit the data via BT to the perps..

Considering very few CC and ATM bank cards now days are issued with no chip (mag stripe only) and many older non chipped cards most likely have expired and no longer valid I highly doubt the perps would get enough CC data from mag stripe transactions to make this effort worth it.

Chip first is required by the terminal, only if the chip reader fails to work three times in a row will the mag stripe reader be enabled.. Granted, they could have been skimming the very few debit cards which may not have chips but even that to me seems to be very low hanging fruit for the effort these folks went through.

The perps that installed the readers in the pix above were caught, they came from Romania via Canada into the States, rented a vehicle and eventually drove to my state.. That was a lot of cost and effort on only the hopes of capturing only mag stripe transactions.. Which leads me to believe that even the chip safety is a fallacy..

What can be encrypted, can be decrypted if one wants to go to the effort and the effort has a big enough payoff..