shanen's Journal: How safe is a contact-free card?

"How safe is my contact-free debit card?" Seems like that should be an easy question to answer, but the Japanese bank that issued the card and the Japanese police won't say. Or maybe they can't?

My plan was to send this query to the Japanese police. They actually have a webform on their website. But the above paragraph was enough to use up most of the character limit. My theory is that the Japanese police do not want to deal with or even talk to foreigners. At all.

My twisted theory is that foreigners might notice things that criminals are doing. Things that are designed to be ignored or overlooked by Japanese people, even when the Japanese people are being targeted by the criminals. Might be helpful to listen? But you sure can't prove that theory by me.

So back to the debit card, eh? I actually saw the card in action for the first time the other day, and I still don't know how the money was extracted, though I'm pretty sure it involved a portable billing device about the size of a smartphone. Seems like an open invitation for an electronic pickpocket, but apparently no one wants to understand such questions. Or say how to prevent it. Faraday Cage perhaps?

I'm not too surprised by the bank's indifference. Whatever money they are making on the deal, they must be dismissing potential theft as a cost of doing business. Some mix of profits from card use and their ability to trace thefts that actually get noticed and reported?

However I'm quite disappointed by the Japanese police. Again. "Live and let live" is one thing, but "Live and let scam" seems to be too much on the criminals' side.

I still like to close with a joke. The one that seems suitable for this topic involves international communication, spinning on the old joke about the plumber.

Imagine a one-minute message. In English, I can convey 100% of the message in one minute. Using my Japanese, it will take about two minutes and comprehension drops. Call it 80%? A typical human translator will run it up to five minutes with comprehension around 60%. But to really mess it up, bring in a machine translator and it will take at least 10 minutes to convey 25% of the information. Suffice it to say the Japanese police love their machine translators.