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stapczynski · 7 years ago

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RFID Scanned?

8am Monday morning, October 30th, I got woken up from a call. I didn’t recognize the number. I ignored it and tried to go back to sleep. Then I got a text. It read:

FreeMsg: card Fraud Alert: Did you attempt $20.0 at CUMBERLAND FARMS 6 on 10/30? Reply 1=Yes 2=No. STOP to Cancel or HELP

That woke me up.

I texted back 2.

FreeMsg: Alert Update: $20.00 on 10/30 confirmed as fraud. We will contact you shortly or you should call 8003086995 ASAP. Reply STOP to cancel or HELP

I then got a call from card services. They asked me a few questions turned off my card, and mailed me a new one.

This whole situation made me really upset. I thought back about what I did the previous day, Sunday. It was a nice day so I ended up walking from North Station to Northeastern. (Since I’m also out of shape) I walked past MGH and remember a fellow getting close to me on the sidewalk. Could he have scanned my card? Deluded with anger, I called MGH and reported the incident of the man walking too close to me. The officer that filed my report probably thought I was nuts, and I was.

Coincidentally, we learned about security and identity theft in class that day. We were reminded of all the ways our identity can be stolen. So that man walking close to me? Probably didn’t have a card scanner. I was probably compromised by the Equifax breach, along with everyone else.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting how RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips and readers work. The chip on, say, a credit card is just that, a chip- no battery. So what the reader does is send power to the chip, along with a read request. The chip then transmits data back to the reader. A crude version of this was actually used during WWII. British military used RFID to distinguish friendly aircraft from the enemies.

Years later, RFID technology has been used to identify hazardous material in the case of illegal dumping.

So we technically had wireless charging way back when.

someone used my card at a Cumberland Farms in Templeton Massachusetts.

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