Despite card blocking: thieves pay with stolen cards – how to prevent this

Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg warns that thieves can still make contactless payments with a Giro card (formerly known as an EC card) that has already been blocked. Even many hours after the card was blocked. This problem should be unknown to many giro card owners.

Always have lost cards blocked immediately…

If you lose your Giro card or it is stolen, you must have the card blocked immediately. Either by calling the blocking emergency number or by calling your bank. You can read how this works in the article stolen cash card: You must do this immediately!

… but that alone is not always enough

In one specific case, however, the thieves were still able to make contactless purchases worth several hundred euros with the already blocked card, even though the card owner had her card blocked just a few minutes after the loss. The reason, according to RBB: There is sometimes a delay in data forwarding in the bank system. The decisive factor for successfully preventing contactless payment with a blocked giro card is “whether the retail company’s checkout system is connected online to the blocking system or whether the blocking is communicated every 12 hours or every 24 hours as part of an update.” If the latter is the case, the lock is only implemented with the appropriate delay.

The only way to prevent this residual risk is to have the cardholder block contactless payment without a pin at the bank from the outset.

Direct debit with stolen card

But there is another problem: With a blocked Girocard, you can still use the direct debit procedure. If you want to prevent this, you must also have the card blocked by the police. You do that with the Kuno blocking service. This blocking is the only way to ensure that large retail chains no longer accept payments with a signature.

Although the consumer can later claim back the damage caused by signature fraud from the respective retail company, this is often very time-consuming. In any case, it is better to avoid this problem in the first place.