Necessity is the mother of invention

https://feddit.uk/post/50353549

I’ll do one better:

My payment card was just a bit too wide to fit in my cellphone’s cover. The phone’s own NFC antenna is at the top - and I use it all the time - so the card had to be at the bottom of the cover to avoid triggering the phone all the time, in portrait orientation so-to-speak.

So I dissolved the card in acetone to extract the NFC chip and its antenna, then carefully reshaped one end of the antenna so it’s a bit less wide (and since I couldn’t modify the length of the wire or the number of turns in any way to avoid de-tuning the antenna too much, I sort of accordioned one side of the rectangle to accommodate the extra wire).

Then I set the new shape of the antenna permanently by carefully applying a piece of packing tape over it, flipped it over, taped over the other side to seal everything, then carefully cut around the new, ultra-thin, stubbier contactless payment “card”.

Now it fits really smartly in my cellphone cover!

Well, what if you need an actual card for identification in the bank or something similar? Do you just show them the dissolved one?
The only time I’ve gone to my bank in the last 20 years was to get a new card, or to open a new account at a new bank.
Don’t know about OP but gov ID works for that purpose. I’m more worried about when they go to a store that doesn’t accept tap.

I was thinking about this, and there are two easy workarounds, I think:

  • If possible, get a second active card in the same name. Ideally, a full-identical cloned card. Not sure if this would be allowed, but if not…
  • Add another authorized user to your account and never give them the card, then just dissolve that card for tap payments.
  • But, in either case, I do think you might run into a different issue: automated fraud detection sometimes requires me to chip+PIN, even for transcribed below the tap limit. This has happened to me when traveling. I don’t think there would be any way around that, and if you then fail to authenticate with chip+PIN, it’s reasonable to think that the bank would lock your card for contactless payments until you successfully authenticate the card again with chip+PIN. (To be clear: this is only speculation; not sure if that would be an issue in practice.)

    So, I suspect that whether this would work or not might depend on your institution (or maybe jurisdiction?)