Many people remain nervous about RFID chips. Now lots of credit cards are arriving in the mail that have RFID on board. The credit card technology is called PayPass. Instead of swiping your card when you want to pay for something, you simply place your card near the PayPass reader, and the card’s RFID chip transmits your card number to the reader.

This article shows you what the typical PayPass chip looks like:

Inside the PayPass: Credit card case mods

The chips are now being embedded inside normal credit cards. You know this has happened to your credit card if you see the PayPass logo on the card.

Why are some people nervous about PayPass? This article contains a nice summary of the general fears:

RFID and security

From the article:

With a sufficiently powerful reader (which could be built easily with off the shelf hardware), someone could read the information off your card from several feet away. Not scared yet? If these get out in sufficient quantities the potential financial gain will be great enough to justify the effort, and pickpockets will just have to walk around in a subway, club, elevator to get 1000′s of cards.

There are enough articles on the Internet to breathe life into these fears, like this one:

PayPass open to hack attacks?

Are these stories and these fears justified? This article would lead you to think otherwise:

Hacking Contactless Payment Cards

If you buy into the fears, or you simply wish to eliminate any possibility of the RFID tag getting hacked, you have an option. You can disable the RFID chip very easily. It won’t affect the mag stripe at all, so the card will function perfectly as a “normal” credit card. Here are instructions – the process is very easy:

[See previous DIY]