OT: Contactless card fraud?

[Tim Streater]

Ha, v. funny as usual Dave, keep 'em coming :-)

[Davey]

When I retired early, before being old enough to receive my pension, my bank said that I had no predictable regular income, and so I did not qualify for a credit card. I didn't argue, I had adequate savings, I live within my means and use my debit card. I could probably get a credit card now, but I really can't be bothered.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

With my bank, credit cards were around long before debit cards. If debit cards had started at the same time, I'd probably not have got a credit card.

[Roger Mills]

So how exactly did Ken achieve that while he was a schoolboy?

[Roger Mills]

Well at least if you lose an Oyster card, the finder can only use the remaining credit on it - unlike a contactless credit card.

Unless, of course, your Oyster card uses some sort of automatic top-up mechanism when the balance gets low. Do they have that facility?

[Roger Mills]

Or maybe he prefers to lock the stable door *before* the horse bolts?!

[Roger Mills]

Whereas the card readers never fail to work?

[Max Demian]

The PIN certainly won't be available - that's always stored using one way encryption - even the bank can't decrypt it.

[damduck-egg]

I did not bother for years to get a credit card and the only reason that I decided to obtain one was for the protection provided under the Consumer Credit Act when purchasing items eligible for such protection as a move from city to countryside coincided about the same time as online purchasing made that preferable than driving miles to physical shops. That is basically all I use it for and it is always paid up before the period at which any charges would apply. I think the only exception is if I were to use it an ATM to obtain cash as the charge is unavoidable but would only occur if my debit card failed or was lost and I needed some cash. It is useful to have such a backup as with physical bank branches closing rapidly it is not so easy to pop into one and sort things out and obtain some cash.

G.Harman

[Max Demian]

Nothing to stop drug dealers issuing their own contactless cards. Combined with a gruesome method of dealing with users who don't pay up.

[damduck-egg]

Whatever the speed of tickets compared to Oyster or Contactless many tickets are deliberately set to be a lot more expensive than using the cards.

My last visit to the smoke was to tour 55 Broadway the Art Deco inspired building that was once LT's headquarters.

Cash fare from Richmond where I park is to St James's Park would be £3.90 Peak single or £2.80 of peak. A ticket purchased at a machine will £5.90 at all times as there is no peak/off peak difference. With two of us that meant tickets there and back would have been £23. 60 We traveled off peak and used oyster we have held for years and it was £11.20. Quite a difference.

G.Harman

[tim...]

well it's encrypted in the sense that it's binary data on the card

so if you just dump the whole card you need to do some leg work to work out which bits represent which items of data

But it isn't encrypted with a cryptographic algorithm that requires a key

tim

[tim...]

I'm not entirely sure what point the PP was trying to make

buy you seem to be missing the information that Ken was not actually a schoolboy in the 1980s

tim

[tim...]

Yup (if you've opted in)

tim

[Andy Burns]

You could use a prepaid contactless debit card, then you'd limited to however much you'd loaded onto the card, also handy for purchases from less known/trusted online sellers.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Roger Mills wrote on 24/02/2017 :

More likely they have needlessly given in to pressure, from those few customers who do have unfounded concerns about them.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Graham. expressed precisely :

The problem was the time it took to insert the card and type in the correct pin. Much quicker to just wave a card at the reader. I use mine often and hate it when it does demand a pin.

[Harry Bloomfield]

whisky-dave expressed precisely :

Which involves getting cash, carrying it/enough, paying a maybe a pile of change. Versus one tiny plastic card, where you can track each spend you make.

[Roger Mills]

According to a survey carried out by Which?, it's a lot more than a few! I think that most card companies - excluding Barclaycard - have made a commercial decision that they would prefer people who have legitimate concerns about contactless cards to keep using one of their cards - albeit a non-contactless one - rather than taking their business elsewhere.

[Roger Mills]

I think most of us realise that. But the previous poster *appears* to think that he was - unless, of course, he was using sloppy English.