Last night while surfing the web for something totally unrelated to credit card fraud (I totally forget what it was now – you know how that goes) I came across a rather interesting article. Given that we now know that contactless payment cards (think MasterCard “PayPass,” Visa’s “payWave,” and Exxon and Mobile’s “SpeedPass”) can be read by anyone passing a reader near your wallet or purse, I think it’s only a matter of time that a watch with a built-in payment chip is going to be used against us. ITPro article and many others – Google it!
Then again, I suspect they already have. According to the article, contactless payment chips were embedded in a ring as far back as 1964. They’ve been big in Europe for years. They’ve been sticking them in cell phones lately and now over in Austria, a company called LAKS is marketing watches with embedded PayPass chip sets with the approval of MasterCard.
I have to wonder how many fraudulent transactions have been perpetrated with these things while our friends in the credit card industry have their heads in the sand.
Calling Dick Tracy: Credit card watches debut
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