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Credit Card, Bank Card NFC. The most useless function every invented

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Halcyon:

* NFC cards are orders of magnitude harder to duplicate or fake than the old mag-stripe cards.
* Non-contact means less wear and tear on cards, particularly in places like Australia where card payments represented about 75% of consumer payments last year.
* You can use your phone as an NFC payment device, negating the need to carry a physical card at all.
* Payments can be completed much faster, for example, at parking station boom gates.
* ATM/payment terminal skimmers traditionally read the magstripe data from cards and optically captured your PIN. Now that magstripe has been disabled (at least in the first instance when attempting to pay), these skimmers are now useless.
* NFC card skimming although theoretically possible, it's not really practical. Instances of skimming in Australia fell by 37.3% in the last financial year alone and if you go back further, it just keeps falling year-on-year. Most banks (here) will reverse/refund disputed transactions without question.
* NFC means I don't have to touch a grubby payment terminal that all and sundry have touched after picking their nose or adjusting their bollocks

Berni:
Yep i find NFC payment cards useful too. It is more convenient without any major down side.

The one generation older chip with contacts uses the same kind of one time key exchange to sign a transaction, only difference being that the communication happens over gold plated pads rather than over a magnetic field. As others have said this means you must perform the transaction right there on the spot (so more work, less profitable and easy to get caught). It is impossible to clone a card this way.

The more important part now is that a device with NFC like a phone or smartwatch or whatever can emulate a NFC payment card. There is no need for a wanky new proprietary system to enable payment with these devices. Not even a need for a special service for this like ApplePay or GooglePay (Unless you own a device made by a manufacturer that actively takes steps for that to be impossible on there devices for the purpose of creating a monopoly...) Lots of large banks have mobile banking applications that can NFC emulate a regular Visa or MaserCard or whatever payment card.

Using a mobile phone is NOT the replacement for a wallet (like where would you keep your ID card, drivers license, registration...etc). It just provides a convenient alternative for a case where you might have forgot your wallet at home, in your car, at work..etc and it allows electronic banking to happen between mere mortals rather than only with companies. I can give the guy next to me 6.58€ exactly to the last digit by simply scanning a QR code, no need to muck about with finding change for the 50€ piece of paper i have in my wallet. This is the future of money.

Halcyon:
Ultimately, it gives consumers another choice. I use NFC 99% of the time. If you don't like it, simply don't use it? It causes no harm having it there. Perhaps one day if the chip part of your card dies or for some reason the terminal has a fault, you can still pay for things.

BradC:

--- Quote from: SmallCog on March 02, 2022, 03:08:22 am ---I'm surprised if it's new, I reckon it's been here for about 10 years, and nobody I know has ever been skimmed.
--- End quote ---

I've seen it done as a proof of concept. It's a one time thing. The device "skims" the card and can be used once only due to a "rolling code" (it's a bit more complex). Any transaction in Australia >= $100 requires a PIN. So the skim can be used once for a transaction < $100 and only if the card holder hasn't used the card between the skim and the attempt.

It's not incredibly secure in the traditional context, but it's secure enough to make the labour involved not worth the effort.

retiredfeline:

--- Quote from: BradC on March 03, 2022, 09:10:18 am ---Any transaction in Australia >= $100 requires a PIN.

--- End quote ---

Was raised to >= $200 at the beginning of the pandemic.

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