Some Kiwis are now, rightly, worried about Eftpos skimming. But in the US, customers have got the willies about a whole new level of fraud: wireless hacks. The answer, says one geek, is to fry your ATM card in a microwave

It goes like this: a number of new US debit and credit cards, such as MasterCard's PayPass ATM and Visa's Contactless, now come with an embedded chip and miniature antenna. The idea is that you wave your card in front of an LCD at checkout, and funds are automatically withdrawn from your account.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) says some customers worry that radio transmissions are relatively easy to hack (though the MasterCard's ariel, which like other RFID components draws power from a scanner, must be within two inches to transmit). And some people just hate RFIDs anyway because they also serve as real-time locator devices. Thus a mini-industry has sprung up for deactivating RFIDs. But experts say that some touted RFID-busting devices, such as RFIDWasher and TagZapper, could also fry your iPod or any other gadget in the area. A better answer: give your smart card a quick twirl in your microwave. The electro-magnetic radiation will make short work of its circuits.

(Footnote: Incidentally, while trawling our publisher's photobank for a stock picture to go with this story, I found the above microwave with an SD Card reader. National, the maker of the oven, is a sister company of SD Card pusher Panasonic. Synergy!)