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There is nothing worse than losing your wallet. That sense of rising panic as you search through your bag or pockets and realise it’s gone.
Recently a good friend of mine lost theirs but what he didn’t realise was that he had a debit card with Paywave.
Unfortunately, a not so honest person got hold of his card and then proceeded to shop up large.
Paywave makes it so easy for you to shop as you don’t need to use your pin or signature. You place your card on the Eftpos box and it accepts payment as long as there is money in the account. A supposed safety feature of the card is that each transaction only goes to $80 –the thief with my friend’s wallet knew this, as he spent $80 in each store and then tried to return items for cash.
The banks do keep a close eye on the cards and luckily in this case they picked up the fact that the user had made five $80 Paywave transactions within a very short space of time. The bank called the user, which alerted him to the fact that his wallet was missing. Lucky the bank picked it up when they did and will return what was spent.
For security reasons, I didn’t want Paywave when it came out and said so when I got my new cards from the banks. However, I later discovered that the bank had ignored my request and sent me a new card which was Paywave activated.
Look at your cards and if you have a four-dash radar like symbol on it, it means it is active for Paywave. On the card somewhere it will say ‘paypass’. I had no idea it was there and checked with various friends and family members who also didn’t know they had it.
So it pays to check your cards, but don’t expect your bank to necessarily turn Paywave off at your request – some banks will let you turn it off (a simple process that you can do yourselves via online banking, or have the bank do it for you), while others don’t allow it.
And shop owners – if a customer comes in and asks whether you have Paywave, proceed with caution.
