... wireless pickpocketing era

[Peter Fairbrother]

Ian G Batten wrote:

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> On 9 May 2007, at 01:58, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
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>> "Smartcard heralds cashfree era"
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>> http://money.guardian.co.uk/saving/banks/story/0,,2074949,00.html
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>> Basically a contactless smartcard a la oyster for payments up to =A310.
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> I paid for my coffee yesterday evening with my Suica card, which does
> Oyster-like jobs for JR trains in and around Tokyo, and as of last
> month (hooray!) also replaced Passnet on buses and subways (although
> for that your Suica card is a special case of a Pasmo card).  There's
> a huge number of shops that take Suica.  I don't know what the limit
> on transactions is.
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> Moreover, I've paid for two meals now with no authorisation on my
> credit card: hand it over, they pop it in a machine and hand it
> back.  There's some C&P, which amazingly interworks (or is ignored: I
> didn't think to type a wrong PIN to check), but I couldn't convince a
> Shinkasen ticket machine that claimed to do C&P to take my cards last
> night at Shinagawa station, so I'm off today to find some cash to buy
> them with --- I don't fancy negotiating buying a train ticket in very
> broken English.

I'm not in Japan :), and I'm a little confused - they pop it in a machine?
then it isn't a contactless card, I guess.


I had envisaged pickpockets in a crowd with their seconds (I don't know the
correct word, but they tend to work in pairs as a minimum) buying cigarette=
s
on a radio-linked card, with the crowd man just scarfing cards in the peopl=
e
in the crowd.

The crowd and person would not notice - and three or four transactions woul=
d
get them their next fix. The needed electronics are almost disposable - the
tech knowledge to adapt them little more so.

 - no physical contact, no exchange of possession, and therefore .. no thef=
t
? - abstraction? Don't think it's fraud - Nick?

--=20
Peter Fairbrother