Millions of credit and debit card users could be ‘robbed by radiowave’ because of new contactless technology being brought in by banks.

Almost 20million shoppers are now able to buy goods by simply waving their card in front of a reader at the tills, even if it is still in a wallet or a purse.
But industry experts have warned that the information emitted by the cards can be stolen by fraudsters using handheld receptors that cost as little as £7 on the internet.

It means cardholders – most of whom are given a contactless card automatically when their old one expires – can unknowingly surrender their personal bank details to a thief by simply walking past them in the street.


The technology in the card, known as radio frequency identification (RFID), transmits bank details via its own radio signal, and is accepted in many High Street chains, including Co-op, Boots and Pret-a-Manger.

It does away with the need for a customer inputting their PIN when buying goods, and was designed to reduce queues at the checkout.

However, a fraudster with a contactless card reader can easily collect the 16-digit credit card number, expiry date and name – known as RFID skimming – from anyone who walks past carrying one of the new cards.

They then have enough information to rack up huge bills at any internet shopping site – such as Amazon – that does not demand the three-digit security code on the back of the card.

David Maxwell, a former policeman and director of RFIDprotect, a firm which specialises in protection against card fraud, said: ‘It has been a big problem in America for a while and is getting to be a big problem over here.’
Cards can be protected from RFID skimmers by being wrapped in tin foil or being kept in special foil-lined wallets.

Customers should also call their banks as soon as they suspect their card is being used fraudulently.

Ron Delnevo, of independent ATM operator Bank Machine, said: ‘Nobody really wants this technology yet it is being handed down to us by the banking industry. It is putting us all at increased risk of fraud.’

Apple has just laid claim to a world first: 64-bit processing inside a real, ready-for-sale smartphone. The new A7 processor will power the iPhone 5s with a "desktop-class architecture" consisting of over 1 billion transistors. That's twice as many transistors as were squeezed into the A6 and, for the sake of context, it's not a million miles away from the 1.4 billion transistors found in a current Intel Ivy Bridge desktop-class PC chip. In other words, while ARM's own 64-bit mobile chip design, the Cortex-A57, is still being developed by chip- and phone-makers, Apple's in-house team has pipped them all to the post.


Largely as a result of the extra transistors and 64-bit architecture, the A7 is claimed to be twice as fast as its predecessor, both in terms of CPU and graphics performance. Speaking of graphics, Apple also promises that its newly added support for the OpenGL ES 3.0 standard will enable "breakthroughs in performance" for visually intensive games such as Infinity Blade III. And it won't just be games that benefit -- iOS 7 will be 64-bit too, naturally, and Apple's own built-in apps will be "re-engineered" to exploit this next-gen processing capability. (The A7 and iPhone 5s will also be backwards compatible with existing 32-bit apps.)


Finally, it's interesting note that the iPhone 5s has a secondary processor, the Apple M7, which is tailored for processing motion and other sensory inputs and is presumably designed for unburdening the main chip and allowing the iPhone 5s to work as a fitness tracker and accomplish other sensory-based tasks without excessive battery drain.