TfL guarantees fraud-proof contactless payments
08 September, 2011
category: Contactless, Transit
Will Judge, head of future ticketing at Transport for London, has promised that confidential information stored on a user’s contactless bank card will be “100 percent safe” from fraud, according to ZDNet UK.
TfL, which announced plans last year to adopt contactless credit card payments on top of its existing Oyster card system, maintains that the type of data held on contactless cards will be restricted so as to be useless for electronic pickpockets.
“The first thing to note is that not all the information about a customer’s account is recorded on the bank card itself,” Judge told the London Assembly transport committee. “So, for example, the information that is recorded within the chip of the card or the magnetic stripe that many cards carry, or can be transmitted electromagnetically when the card is used for a transaction, doesn’t include names and addresses information of that nature, so those are held by bank themselves not on the card itself. You cannot extract enough information from a card to spend someone else’s money.”
Furthermore, Judge added that TfL will retain all travel data, leaving banks with access to transaction information and nothing else.
Another deterrent to fraud is the low transaction limit of £15, according to Shashi Verma, director of fares and ticketing at TfL.
TfL plans to implement the first wave of contactless payments on London buses next spring, with the tube, London Overground, Docklands Light Railway, tram and National Rail services in London following later in the year.
Read more here.