... wireless pickpocketing era

[Nicholas Bohm]

Peter Fairbrother wrote:
> Ian G Batten wrote:
> 
>> On 9 May 2007, at 01:58, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>>
>>> "Smartcard heralds cashfree era"
>>>
>>> http://money.guardian.co.uk/saving/banks/story/0,,2074949,00.html
>>>
>>> Basically a contactless smartcard a la oyster for payments up to £10.
>> 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.
>>
>> 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 thought your English was OK last time we spoke.

> 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 cigarettes
> on a radio-linked card, with the crowd man just scarfing cards in the people
> in the crowd.
> 
> The crowd and person would not notice - and three or four transactions would
> 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 theft
> ? - abstraction? Don't think it's fraud - Nick?

It's the sort of fraud consisting of deceiving a machine, which UK fraud
notions used to find difficult to accommodate; but they are supposed to
have been fixed by the Fraud Act 2006 (which I haven't yet had time to
read).

Nick
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