I have made a minor nuisance of myself at my local bank branch, repeatedly requesting plain-jane magnetic stripe-only credit cards whenever they send me a replacement card every few years.
Why?
Because anyone with a couple hundred bucks and some spare time can swipe your credit card right out of your wallet without picking your pocket, that's why. In related news, military ID cards in the USA have RFID technology embedded in them, as well as US passports.
So what?
So with a few hundred more dollars, a thief (money or identity) can make a brand-spanking new card with their name and photo on it, and be you for as long as it takes to break in to a military installation and blow it up, or as long as it takes to go to the store and buy a card-limit's worth of stuff. That's why.
What a stupid [deleted] idea.
What can I do about it?
You can revert to what you make fun of: aluminum foil. Make an aluminum foil sleeve for your credit and ID cards with RFID chips on them, and keep the cards in the sleeves until the actual point of use. An electronic pickpocket can read your card from across the street with the most powerful of readers on the market, but nobody can read it with an RF-blocking shield around it.
FYI.
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