A special case for your debit card: useful or nonsense? † Tech

It says ‘RFID Protection’ (RFID stands for ‘radio frequency identification’† And they sell like hot cakes. “If it doesn’t help, then it won’t hurt,” it sounds here and there. Because for barely eighty cents you have a case in which you can put your debit or credit card.

Wireless payment technology is not new, but has been on the rise in recent years. Especially since corona, we prefer to pay without putting our card in the terminal, because then we don’t have to enter our code for small amounts. Last year, the number of contactless payments registered by Bancontact Payconiq increased by 85 percent to 822.7 million times. A milestone was reached in December: wireless payment became the norm for the first time: 54 percent of the total that month.

New technology scares people – sometimes for good reason – and now too. There are many stories about people who have been robbed on the internet and also in the gossip circuit. And about thieves who walk around with a payment terminal to scan someone’s back pocket or handbag. Looking for an easy side income.

In reality, those stories are never true. For example, Febelfin, the association of banks in Belgium, has not registered a single case where someone has been robbed via a wireless debit card: “By purchasing such a terminal, the fraudster is easy to identify and trace. The chance of being caught is therefore high and the potential loot very limited. The risks of this form of fraud are therefore enormous for the fraudster, compared to the possible return,” says Isabelle Marchand of Febelfin.

There is a limit on such payments. The amount is a maximum of 50 euros and, depending on your bank, you can only pay two or three times per day without a PIN.

Nevertheless, these types of covers are in theory still useful in some cases. If you work at a company, there is a good chance that access badges are used there. In many cases they work with the same technology – roughly – as bank cards. Old systems are often not properly secured, making the card relatively easy to copy.

There are devices to do that, and you can just buy them at web shops. The latest generation of access badges is fairly difficult to crack. Your employer knows which type of card you have in your hands. You can often check it yourself by scanning with your smartphone. Apps such as NFC tools (android † iOS) can find out quite easily which card you have.

But even if you had an older type, you shouldn’t immediately worry: “The chance that someone will try to hack you in this way is quite small for most people,” says Lennert Wouters, researcher of the university of Leuven. “You have to decide for yourself whether you are a potential target or not.”

The cheapest are the covers that we found on the market. Eighty cents is ‘no money’. You can order them even cheaper at your favorite Chinese webshop. Special wallets with shielding are slightly more expensive: of good quality they can easily be 100 euros or more.

Both the expensive and cheap option we tested do indeed shield your cards. We try to pay with a bank card, but that is not possible as long as it is in the more expensive wallet. The case works just as well. The big problem is: the covers are absolutely not practical. We had to fiddle around to find our debit card there. So you do lose time. Then a wallet with RFID protection is a better idea.

We were also lucky, as it turns out. Because there are a lot of bad ‘covers’ on the market: ,,There is a lot of junk, covers that have no effect at all”, says Lennert Wouters. In other words, you can’t be sure if you’re not buying a kitty cat and will probably have to buy some of those cases to find one that actually works.

No, the covers are objectively not useful for the average consumer. Because they are not expensive, many people will still buy a case. But feel free to calculate how much time you waste each day by fishing your card out and you immediately know that the juice is not worth the cabbage. There is a good chance that your RFID cover will end up in the garbage dump in no time. A special wallet is more convenient, but absolutely not a must. Unless you happen to work for the security service, or for another employer that is an interesting target for hackers.