#954: ChanceCards

Credit card fraud costs us all money (since the banks aren’t about to take any responsibility for it -or indeed, it seems, for anything).

Today’s invention is a simple ‘honeytrap’ system to further frustrate credit card criminals.

Every time I get a new card, I’m supplied with say four others, identical except for a small numerical variation in the identifying codes. These I carry with me so that they all develop a similar level of wear within my wallet.

If said wallet is stolen, the thieves have a four in five chance of having their illegal transaction fail, alert a central system to the IP address being used and immediately disable the real card.