Stolen contactless cards can still be used by thieves even after they have been cancelled, it has emerged.
Due to a ‘weakness in the system’, five of the UK’s biggest banks have admitted that stolen contactless cards can still be used when they’re ‘offline’.
Nationwide, RBS, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays all issue customers with contactless cards which are authorised to make payments ‘offline’.
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The Financial Conduct Authority raised the loophole last year but despite promising to sort it out the banks admit it has not yet been fixed.
The watchdog has even proved that some fraudsters have carried on using the cards up to eight months after they had been reported stolen.
Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) chief John Griffith-Jones said progress was being made but offline payments were ‘a weakness in the system.’
There are now more than 108 million contactless cards being used and spending topped £25 billion last year.
MailOnline reported the Bank of England’s chief cashier Victoria Cleland revealed she does not trust the technology and prefers to use cash for small payments than a contactsless card.
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The 47-year-old said: ‘Cash is definitely here to stay.’
A spokesman for Nationwide said: ‘Almost all contactless transactions are now online, so a contactless card will be declined as soon as its reported lost or stolen.
‘In a small number of cases such as vending machines, parking charges, road tolls and transport fares, where having the right change can be inconvenient for the customer and costly for the service operator, the payment is made offline.
‘However, in these cases the transaction will not be applied to the account if the card has been reported lost or stolen, so the customer won’t lose out.’
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