£504.8 million how does that sound to you? A massive amount of money eh! Well I can tell you that is the amount of cash that has been stolen by crook’s from that you and I own, last year alone which is an increase of 20%, as the low bellied snakes siphon as much cash from our cards before the introduction of Chip and Pin.

With the introduction of Chip and Pin, the credit card thieves of this world will find it harder it is hoped, to get their grubby fingers on our cash. This is because with the old signing for purchases system, we were open to having our details easily swiped from the metallic strip on the cards. This was quite easily done, because if you took your eye off the ball for a split second, your card could be swiped through a hand held machine that copied your details that were then transferred on to a new card and used to make illegal purchases that were then sold on and made into hard cash.

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Chip and Pin will take away this type of fraud, leaving the crooks that have made a substantial amount of money from this sting, looking for other ways of making up for there losses. This may already have happened, with the credit card companies sending out replacement cards with the Chip and Pin facilities many are being intercepted by thieves and using them in on the Internet with “card not seen” purchases.

This was probably expected to happen to some extent, though not with such a high volume that it has.

The amount of cash that has been taken fraudulently from our cards is at a frightening level, with Identity Theft on cards up around the 22% mark, to approx £37 million, cards that have been “skimmed” up 17% to £130 million and cards that were lost or stolen seen a total loss of around £115 million.

This is unacceptable and hopefully when Chip and Pin is fully up and running then this will steadily decrease, though lets not kid ourselves and think that it is going to go away completely, it wont but lets be on our guards and when you are punching in your four digit Pin, make sure that no-one is looking over your shoulder and getting a peek at it.