Fraudsters Can Use Your Bank Cards After You Cancel Them

In recent years, contactless payment has become a big thing in the world. However, people who use contactless payment could be at risk of fraud if they lose their contactless cards, even after they cancel their card.

Contactless payment is where you just you your card to make payments. You do not need to provide you PIN to purchase products. The limit you can spend with contactless payment is £30.

The revelation came from a MoneySavingExpert investigation. They found that when a debit or credit cards is cancelled it can still be used to make payments. This is a major security issue as they could drain your bank accounts or put you in massive amounts of debt.

A computer engineer from Cheshire is the one who first discovered the problem. In November of last year, Justin Robson, had his debit and credit card stolen from the glove box of his card. He then realised that there were purchases that he didn’t make in July. He saw that purchases, totalling £30, were being made over 30 miles away from where he lived.

He then reported this to Halifax, his bank, and said he doesn’t know how long the person had been buying things from his cards. They told him to look out for more of these purchases, as they didn’t know when the contactless payment would stop or not.

Halifax refunded the money from the thefts, £6 for his calls to the fraud team and £100 for ‘distress and inconvenience’.

A spokesperson for Halifax said: “In the unlikely event that contactless transactions have been made on a cancelled lost or stolen card, we will always refund the customer in order to ensure they are not out of pocket.”

When a card has been lost or stolen and then is used to make a contactless payment it may still work. If your card has been stolen or not possess the retailer chooses to payment is the same, either ‘online’ or ‘offline’. If it is processed as ‘offline’, the transaction happens straight away. If it is processed as ‘online’ the payment machine checks the customers bank to see if they have the sufficient funds to make the payment. If the card has been reported as lost or stolen the payment will be flagged and the transaction won’t go through. An offline retailer with check the customers bank to check the funds later. This is usually done within 24 hours of the transaction.

Due to the offline process, thieves can steal people’s money virtually undetected. However, sometimes you will need to use provide the cards PIN to verify a transaction.

Another way it is easy for fraudsters to get away with this is because some banks won’t even investigate contactless payments on cancelled cards. So, it is important to keep on top of your accounts transactions.

If you realise that you have either lost or had your card stolen, you should cancel you card as soon as possible. From there, you should regularly check to see if there are any contactless payments you didn’t make. If you find any, you should report them to your card provider, who should investigate the issue and hopefully refund you for the matter.