Do you have a contactless bank card in your wallet? Then you should be on the alert if you see someone with a wireless POS turned on in their hand, in a crowded place.
The photo was taken in the Moscow metro by Oleg Gorobets, an employee of Kaspersky Lab. Gorobets published the image on Facebook, with the comment: "Another reason to keep contactless cards in a safe place, preferably shielded.".
Russian website Tjournal.ru took up the subject, warning that the person in the picture may have been caught stealing money from passengers with contactless cards. Of course, the man may have been just a courier taking the metro for a quick ride, but it is obvious that the wireless terminal is turned on, so he can collect money (up to 100 RON in Romania or 20 Euro abroad) by simply approaching a card in a wallet. An argument in favor of the suspect is that the POS was in plain sight – a thief would hide it.
A bank official told the Russian publication that stealing money from the card can indeed be simple, but withdrawing it from the bank is more difficult, because any POS terminal is managed by a company, a legal entity, so the perpetrator of the fraud is easily detected.
On the other hand, getting your money back can be more complicated because some bank contracts stipulate that any transaction made without entering a PIN is the responsibility of the cardholder. Until then, the safest protection is to use a shielded wallet, the so-called RFID-Blocking Wallet. There are high-end, low-end models and DIY tutorials on the market, and the simplest and cheapest is this one: 