‘I went on holiday – so how was my card used for a £600 spree at home?’ | Money | The Guardian

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Banks maintain that contactless is safe, and card cloning is not cost-effective for thieves.

From ‘I went on holiday – so how was my card used for a £600 spree at home?’ | Money | The Guardian.

Not cost effective in the sense that it is not possible. If thieves do find a way to extract the private keys from the tamper-resistant chip on a contactless card, they the entire payment card system will collapse overnight. Don’t panic about it: they haven’t, and they are extremely unlikely to.

 

In 2015 consumer group Which? used cheaply bought card readers, and freely available software, to remotely “steal” key details from a contactless card and use them to buy items online, one of which was a £3,000 TV.

From ‘I went on holiday – so how was my card used for a £600 spree at home?’ | Money | The Guardian.

 

Ah. I see what you’ve done there. You’ve taken the card number and expiry dates, which are in any case printed on the front of the card (and even embossed to that you can steal them quickly but rubbing a pencil over a piece of paper) and used them to buy goods and an online merchant that doesn’t not do either an AVS or CV2 check. The rules about this are clear: the liability is the merchant’s and neither the issuing bank nor the customers should care less. If merchants are happy to accept this risk, then so what.

However, the point is: the cards are not being cloned.