garyschmitt

It will work in 99.99% of all European credit card POS terminals and ATMs. They take both chip and pin as well as magstripe.

The 0.01% would be the obscure corner cases where you need to buy fuel, and you're not on the highway, and cannot be bothered to drive to a highway fueling station (i.e. you want to use the closest inner-city unmanned station)... or you're using one of the few metro systems that simultaneously require chip and pin but allows foreign cards, and you don't want to stand in line to buy a ticket from a human. If it's one of the machines that requires a domestic chip and pin card, then it won't help to have a foreign chip and pin card anyway.

garyschmitt

The iCache card most likely has a signature strip.

You never know if it's their card. Even if their photo is on the bit of plastic you get to look at, along with digitized hand-written signature on the front, the track data can still be anything.

I'm not sure how iCache is implemented, but it's potentially even more reliable. The card holder must use a biometric to get the track data written (proving that the device is controlled by the same person making the transaction), and the stored track data could potentially be encrypted on the device such that only iCache and their banks can control the stored track data. If the bank is populating the iCache with one-time-use virtual numbers over a secured connection, the result is more secure than the 80s magstripe that you find on chip and pin cards and american cards.

Although personally I hope it's not that secure, because I want to be able to skim my own cards from non-participating banks.

That's very unusual. If you were to refuse to accept the card from a customer who could not produce another card, I suspect you would be violating the Visa acceptance terms that you agreed to. And to the extent that you get away with these excessive requests, you're not protecting yourself, just Visa. Let Visa worry about Visa.

Fraud is not your problem beyond checking the signature. If you actually want to make an effort to protect yourself, what you should be doing is imaging the backside of the card, to further prove that you did your due diligence with the sig check.

Nor should they. Some people only have one card. This is often the case with Europeans. Americans tend to have 10 cards and carry 5 (I don't recall the exact stats, but it's near that), while Europeans normally have 1 card to their name, sometimes 2, but rarely 3.

Europeans also have the hurdle of telling their bank in advance that they will be using their card outside the EU, which means even if they hold more than one card, they may only make the effort to make one card active in the US, leaving the others behind.

Indeed, if the iCache has a magnetic read head, it could make skimming even easier than it is already. However, what if iCache, Inc. thought of that, and they sold the wallet with your name (and variations) hardcoded on the device? If "Bill Smith" skims a card that has a name as different as "Alice Sanchez" on the track data, the device could refuse to record it. Or perhaps iCache knows which card numbers you have (like from the credit bureau), and it only lets you skim the track data of cards you're expected to have.

I'm only speculating though.. I have not found the details on this thing. It could be as unrestricted as you suggest.

garyschmitt

If I were iCache, I would probably allow any card to be skimmed into the wallet's internal storage, but then I would make all skimmed track data unusable until it's verified. There are a number of ways the verification could be done. Cross reference credit bureau data, or charging less than a dollar and making the user enter the amount (like an ACH verification).

Jimmie76

I make sure that when a purchase is made and we are relying on the magstrip for processing, that the digits printed on the card match the visible ones (usually the last four) on the receipt. If they don't, and it hasn't happened to me yet, then we will try and delay the customer from leaving and call the police. That way I can verify if it is the same details on the front of the card as those on the magstrip, still can't prove that it's their card but I can check that as an added security precaution. With this thing I can't do that as there is no front of card to check.

I've never had to tell my bank in advance although I do know people who have had to, I never leave any cards at home either. If you've got one of these devices chances are you're going to have more than one card.

In the UK we see so few cards without Chip 'n' Pin that when we do get one you are automatically cautious, especially if the card holder is British. We had someone come in and try to buy a bigish ticket item one weekend (they picked a time when there were less sales staff around) with a foreign credit card. This wasn't chip and pin so the card got put through the mag reader on the terminal and it was declined. Customer then produced another card from the same brand and it was tried again with the same result. The signatures don't match very well either and the customer then says there must be a problem at his bank and he'll have to go and call them and is never seen again. I wasn't in to check the numbers but that's what happens sometimes, and always on the big ticket items never something small.

cordelli

Funny, the Mrs just got her new Chase card in the mail today. No raised numbers on it, they are in text on the front of the card.

Don't know if it's a trend or not, but at least Chase doesn't care about them anymore.

She actually thought it was one of those call to apply fake card mailings.

MAN Pax

Swipe an unbranded card from an electronic case in a society used to chip and pin. I think not.

ScottC

WOW - four years later, and they still don't have a product to sell.

cordelli

Honestly, I see no use for it.

BUT.

Should somebody take their idea and make it smaller and only for bar codes I would be all over it. I have fifteen bar code key tags on my keychain and would love to have one little picture frame device for them that was accepted by the stores.

WillCAD

Isn't there an electronic boarding pass available from some airlines that lets you bring up the barcode on your smart phone and have it scanned from the screen?

If you have a smart phone you MIGHT be able to simply take photos of the barcodes. Depends on the phone's screen; I would think that some could be read by barcode readers and othere could not. But I;m not very familiar with the electronic BP technology, so I'm not 100% certain this would work.

MAN Pax

Get writing that iPhone App!

Rax

Look into something like KeyRingApp

http://goo.gl/x9dsf

Not exactly the same but it works.

cordelli

Note that I said that merchants would accept. Many local stores won't accept a bar code on any of the cards that print eight on a card (four on each side) and will only scan their store issued card. They would need to buy into any solution, which currently they all do not.

Supposedly, and not a clue if it's true or not, people would share an affinity card to rack up huge bonus points, so the merchants want the actual card.

Which is pretty funny, given that I know a cashier at Shoprite who doesn't pay for travel because whenever a customer does not have a savings card she scans hers for the miles . They get the discounts, she gets the CO miles.

Mike Jacoubowsky

Strange that doesn't come up on an exception report. Her "purchases" must be quite extraordinary.

Getting back to the subject, no way would my current merchant agreement allow me to take a card like the one described in this thread. We are liable for chargebacks if we don't take reasonable precautions to ensure it's the customer's card and that the card is "real" (we're told to make sure there's the holographic image, typically found on the back, and we're charged more for transactions in which the card, presumably the real card, isn't actually in the store).

If someone brought one into the store today, I simply wouldn't take it. At least not without first calling my credit card company and getting assurance from them that they view it as a card that's actually in my store, not a facsimile.

garyschmitt

Brand does not matter. Where the card is stored matters even less. Is the wallet an exposed homebrew circuit board with wires attached to the card? I think not. Visit Europe sometime (where I live). Magstripe is accepted nearly everywhere, with the few odd-ball exceptions I mention.

American tourists are still arriving in significant numbers. Until they are carrying EMV cards, it makes no sense for the tourism industry to hinder them -- it's too important for local commerce.

Aren't cashiers accustomed to letting the machine decide whether the barcode can be used?

I recall having a re-usable barcode for an ongoing promotion. It faded and wore out and so I switched to photocopies and eventually to a computer generated (identical) barcode. Some cashiers were surprised to just get a barcode on an otherwise blank page, but they would scan it anyway, even when there was no text to read. They (rightly IMO) figured that it's the job of the machine to decide whether the code is valid on that transaction, not the human. If the machine takes it, they don't care. I believe the original barcode with all textual rules is only useful in the event that the machine denies the barcode for some reason, and then they need to know how and why to override the machine.

garyschmitt

It's a great idea.

But the app is huge. It should not need to hoard 1.8 MB of space. Looks like the other loyalty card apps are space killers as well.