My wife and I keep getting our debit cards stolen online. We notice the charges and are able to dispute them and cancel our cards, but it sure is annoying.
We don’t put our card information on suspicious websites. They’re on well known websites like amazon and Facebook.
We ran out emails through a data breach checker and it found nothing.
I don’t think there’s any malware on our devices.
Any idea what could be happening and how to prevent it?
A lot of other good comments here but I would also recommend not swiping your card at ANY machine. I had my debit card # lifted several times before I finally decided to only use something secure like ApplePay (at the gas pump particularly). Apple Pay changes the card number every single time it’s used. So, it can at least pinpoint the exact moment it was stolen if it somehow did give up your info. I’ve never had to worry about my card number getting stolen since I made that change.
I don’t have apple pay, but I do use Google pay whenever I can.
Looks like Google will offer that too if you use Google Wallet on your phone.
Google Pay will do the same thing so you should be good there. It’s called credit card tokenization.
And it’s even better than you described. The one time token isn’t a new card number, it’s not a card number at all. It’s basically Apple saying “yep this is legit” to the other computer, and then the two banking systems do their money transfer on the back end.
Even if someone could intercept it and decrypt it, it would be completely useless because that’s just not a thing.
Pretty sure Google does basically the same thing. Never used it though.