FOOL'S EYE VIEW
Keep Your Cards Safe

By Jane Mack (TMFJane)
July 31, 2003

If you're anywhere near a photocopier at the moment, take out all the plastic cards in your wallet/purse, lay them face down on the glass and copy them front and back. Hide the resulting bits of paper in a safe place at home so you have an instant reference to numbers and sort-codes if they ever get lost or stolen.

In fact, if you want to be extra efficient, you could also print off the list of emergency contact numbers for lost or stolen credit cards from the Cardholders section of the Cardwatch website.

Earlier this week my husband had his handbag nicked from his car. (Yes, my husband has a 'handbag' but it's a very manly one!) He'd just arrived back to work after lunch and someone pounced on him to help with something so he toddled off to help and forgot to lock up the car. It was entirely his fault and, to be honest, he felt so stupid that he refused to bother the police about it.

More than anything, he was upset about losing his beautiful Nigerian leather handbag, which has been in the family for 35 years, and also the Swiss penknife it contained because it had belonged to his late father. The mobile phone didn't matter and neither did the £15 in cash that he had in his wallet.

It didn't help that he found it a real chore having to make a list of the cards that were in his wallet, to dig up all the necessary statements for reference purposes and to phone round to cancel all the various bits of plastic he'd had stolen.

According to the Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS), plastic card fraud reached a record high last year with £424.6 million worth of fraudulent transactions being made. The statistics are quite startling:

Counterfeit cards                £148.5m
Cards stolen or lost             £108.3m 
Card not present fraud           £110.1m 
Mail non-receipt                  £37.1m 
Identity theft                    £20.6m 

More than a quarter of that amount came from lost or stolen cards so it's imperative to cancel them the moment you realise there's a problem. You should also watch out when paying for something by credit card because of the growing practice of 'skimming'. Handing your card over at the end of a meal in a restaurant or, worse, leaving your card behind the bar when you're treating friends to an evening is a cardinal sin! A dishonest cashier could secretly copy the magnetic strip by swiping it through a special card reader so the information can be used to make a counterfeit card that is ripe for a spending spree.

And how many times have you discarded a receipt after buying petrol when it may have all the details necessary for an opportunist thief to go shopping for DVDs at Amazon?

The industry is already trialing a new way of paying with plastic that should help to combat fraud. Consumers will be able to verify purchases by keying in a four-digit PIN (Personal Identification Number) rather than signing a receipt. And chips in cards, which are already in use, means that they are much harder to counterfeit. A national roll-out of the new system is expected by 2005 but in the meantime here are some tips:

• Keep your card in sight at all times when making a transaction
• Dispose of unwanted bank statements, utility bills and receipts carefully – preferably by shredding them
• Check statements for unfamiliar transactions
• Report missing cards immediately
• Be wary of people standing too close behind you when using a cash machine

To return to the woeful 'Theft of a Handbag' tale, the doorbell rang at around 11 o'clock that night and we found ourselves confronted by a rather good-looking policeman called James. I don't know about you but it's been a while since we properly encountered a policeman so we were a bit taken aback by the bulletproof vest and all the paraphernalia hanging off his belt. In fact, he was so tooled up that I almost started singing 'YMCA' to him!

Suffice to say, he kindly explained that police officers usually wear this sort of gear these days because people come at them with carving knives occasionally. They'd also found the stolen handbag in a lay-by across the other side of town. The money had gone and so had the mobile along with our front door keys but everything else was there – including all the now-cancelled cards. Apparently, the thieves weren't sophisticated enough to try and make use of them.

We've yet to explain to the neighbours why my husband was carted off in a police car in the midnight hours (they kindly gave him a lift to the station to identify his handbag!), but I'm sure the story will come out sometime soon.

At any rate, it'll be between three and eight days before my husband gets any replacement cards so, for the time being, he has no access to any money whosoever. This was brought home to him when he went off to buy new locks for the front door and got to the end of the road before he sheepishly realised that he had no money, no cards and that the recovered chequebooks were useless without a guarantee card. It's a good job Superwife was to hand!

The strange thing is that the thieves didn't take our Nectar reward card. We obviously shop far too much at Sainsbury's because we've managed to accumulate some 34,000 points on it - the equivalent of about £170. They could have walked into our local supermarket and bought a very nice telly off the shelf simply by using the points.

The one thing my husband will never forget to do again is to lock the car. And he'll keep at least one credit/debit card at home so he can fall back on it if he ever gets his wallet stolen again. And he'll certainly be using the photocopier the moment all his replacement cards arrive!

Find out more about keeping your cards safe in the Security section of our Credit Card Centre.