Inventors are working out ever more ingenious ways to protect consumers from credit card fraud, a trawl of the US Patent Office reveals.
By the time unusual purchase patterns alert a bank to the fact that your card has been cloned, it is too late. Connecticut chip maker ATMI鈥檚 answer, in US patent application 2004/0174749, is to stop crooks getting data out of cards in the first place.
Often, says ATMI, a fraudster will merely 鈥渂orrow鈥� your card from you for a few moments without your knowledge. To extract the data, the crook鈥檚 card reader shines intense UV light on the card鈥檚 chip, making the logic gates of its memory cells surrender some of the charge stored inside them. This allows probes applied to the card鈥檚 contacts to read and store your secret data for copying later.
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ATMI鈥檚 fix is to build extra memory cells into the card that are even more sensitive to UV light than those already present. These cells are pre-programmed with a coded check message that becomes corrupted if the card is bathed in UV. So the next time the card is put in an ATM, it would alert the owner to the fact that the card had been cloned.
Meanwhile, Mark Ogram of Tucson, Arizona, is patenting a simpler early warning system (US 2004/0177046). You provide the bank with a cellphone number or email address. Every time your card is used for payment, the bank automatically sends you a message to notify you of the transaction and where it was made. So the owner knows immediately if a fraudulent transaction has occurred.
California-based Pro-Techtor International takes this idea a stage further (US 2004/0177040). The owner of a credit or ID card gives the card issuer a contact cellphone number. Every time the card is used, a text message is automatically sent to the cellphone requesting a PIN (or password). If there is no reply, or the password is not correctly entered, the transaction is blocked. Even if both card and phone are stolen, the thief cannot use the card, because the password is not stored in the phone.
