Warning issued to Australians using their phones to make tap and go payments
- Cyber expert Ben Britton issues a warning
- He said tap-and-go on smartphones was risky
Australians are being warned about the dangers of storing their credit card details on their mobile phones so they can tap and go digitally.
One in three payments are now made by tapping a smartphone on a contactless device.
New data from the Reserve Bank of Australia showed that younger consumers in particular are more than happy to use their mobile phone instead of a plastic card to make a tap-and-go payment.
But cybersecurity expert Benjamin Britton said credit card apps on mobile phones are vulnerable if a hacker sends a text or email that tricks the owner into clicking on it.
Your virtual phone wallet acts as a digital copy of your card, which means that if hackers have access to your phone, they can also steal your card details.
Unlike internet banking, which requires consumers to log in or access via facial recognition, the digital Wallet app – also used to store a driver’s license, plane tickets or a vaccination certificate – is much less secure.
“If you’re doing it over the phone, that device you’re using is connected to the internet, so if that device has been compromised — if someone had malware installed on it or a hacker had access to it — that information is vulnerable. ,” Britton told Daily Mail Australia.
‘A mobile phone can be hacked and people don’t understand that.
“I’m sure hackers do it every day – figure out how to copy it or set that digital card and they could potentially use it.”
Australians are being warned about the dangers of tapping their mobile phones to pay for goods instead of using their credit cards
Mr Britton, an Australian Army veteran, also warns consumers to be wary of Chinese-made smartphones after Australian government agencies snatched security cameras from the communist country.
“Who makes the devices, because this is the big threat that nobody talks about in cybersecurity – hardware vulnerabilities,” he claimed.
“What actually happens with devices made by China – they put in a physical hardware chip; it’s a chip that’s physically built into the device’s board and has a code in it that gives them access, so it’s a physical back door to a device.”
Mobile payments are growing at the expense of the tap-and-go card method, which has dropped from more than 70 percent to just over 60 percent in the past three years, the RBA’s Consumer Payments Survey found.
Mr Britton explained that a traditional bank card is a safer way to pay than paying with a mobile phone.
“If you have a tap-and-go with a card, the card doesn’t have an internet connection: you tap it and all the information is essentially done offline, then the transaction is sent over the internet,” Mr Britton said.
Consumers have to tap their card in the right spot to make a payment, which Britton says showed how a criminal with a skimming device has to be particularly close to a customer to extract their credit card information from the chip.
“You have to be pretty close to the map and everyone knows that because how many times have you had to go and do tap-and-go and haven’t kept it close enough?”
Since the start of the pandemic, cash payments have decreased by only 13 percent of payments made with banknotes or coins – a halving in three years.
Aside from the risk of being robbed, cash is perhaps the safest option.
Consumers have to tap their card in the right spot to make a payment, which Britton says showed how a criminal with a skimming device has to be particularly close to a customer to extract their credit card information from the chip
One in three payments are now made by tapping a smartphone on a contactless device. New data from the Reserve Bank of Australia showed younger consumers in particular are keen to use their mobile rather than a card to make a tap-and-go payment