What if you could shut down credit card fraud cold? Would you be willing to be a more active consumer to make that happen?
MasterCard is testing a credit card that has a little keyboard on front. When you make an online purchase, the keyboard pops up a random code of 6 numbers to provide an added layer of security for your transaction.
I think this is a brilliant solution to a growing problem of economic identity theft. Most of the time when a crook uses your credit card number to make a purchase and pretends to be you, they just have your number, not the actual card in their possession. So the MasterCard development would prevent this kind of crime.
And here’s another economic identity theft angle that I read about in USA Today. Crooks are now lurking back at a distance when you’re entering your card number at checkout and taking pictures or video of you punching in your card number with the sophisticated built-in cameras that many smartphones have.
This is, yet again, another reason why it is so important we as a country go to smart chips in credit cards like the rest of the world, instead of relying on outdated magnetic strip technology. With a smart chip system, having a credit card number alone wouldn’t do a crook any good because they’d still need the physical card to ring up a transaction while pretending to be you.
