There is a cash machine you use because it is on your way home, and you have never once checked who owns it.
That habit is the whole story. In a case unsealed in Brooklyn on 29 February 2024, US federal prosecutors charged 5 people with installing hidden cameras and devices in ATM card slots, harvesting account information and PINs from more than 600 alleged victims over nearly a year. The charges are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty. Nearly a year is the number to sit with. The money left later, quietly, in someone else's hands.
Most advice about this arrives as a lecture about vigilance, which is useless, because vigilance is not a skill you can practise on a device designed to look ordinary. What you can do is check 3 specific things, each in about 5 seconds, and change where your cards sit when they are not in your hand. That second part matters more every year, because payment habits have moved to tapping. We make wallets, so weigh the final section accordingly, the first 3 cost nothing and we sell none of them.
The part that makes this genuinely hard
You are not supposed to be able to tell. An FBI Special Agent investigating one US skimming case put it plainly: devices are sometimes hidden inside an ATM or a fuel pump with no way for the victim to know, which is why he advised people to review bank and credit card statements regularly for unauthorised transactions. Detection at the machine is a bonus. Detection on the statement is the reliable one.
The direction of travel is not simple. FICO's reporting on 2024 is that US debit card compromise events and the number of compromised cards were down on the year before, while within that same year the second half brought a 46% increase in skimming compromise events against the first half. Lower overall, with a late-year uptick.
And most people are starting from zero. A 2024 survey found 36% of Americans said they did not know what card skimming is, and 29% said they would not know what to do if they found out they had been a victim. That is the real gap. Not carelessness: unfamiliarity with a crime that is built to be unremarkable.
Three checks that separate a safe tap from an expensive one
Useful criteria have to be things you can verify yourself, standing there, without taking anyone's word for it. These are the 3 that survive that test.
Who owns the machine. FICO found that 90% of the US skimming compromises it tracked in 2025 happened at non-bank ATMs: the free-standing terminals in convenience stores and petrol stations, the ones tucked between the crisps and the door. A machine set into the wall of a staffed bank branch is watched, serviced and covered by cameras that belong to someone with a reason to care. The one by the fridge is not.
Whether your PIN is visible. Prosecutors allege the Brooklyn crew used cameras precisely because a stolen card number without a PIN is worth far less. Your free hand solves this. Cup it over the keypad every time, including at the pump, including when there is nobody behind you, until you stop noticing you are doing it.
What your last 7 days look like. Two minutes on a Sunday, every Sunday. You are not scanning for the big number; you are scanning for the small one, the £1 or $1 test transaction that tells a fraudster the card is live before the real spending starts. Turn on transaction alerts in your banking app while you are there, and you have moved detection from monthly to instant.
A short physical check at the machine, done once, then repeated by habit:
- Pull gently on the card slot and the keypad surround. Fitted parts do not move.
- Look at the card slot against the machine beside it. Colour, depth and gloss should match.
- Glance above the screen for a pinhole or a lip that does not belong to the housing.
- If anything feels loose, walk. There is another machine, and your afternoon is worth more than the detour.
Detection at the machine is a bonus. Detection on the statement is the reliable one.
What actually works, including the things we do not sell
Here is the honest boundary, because getting this wrong is how people end up protected against the thing that was not happening. A shielded wallet does nothing about a device wedged inside an ATM card slot. That attack is physical and it happens after the card leaves your hand. Against it, your defences are the machine you choose, the hand over the keypad, and the statement you actually read. All free.
The reason the wallet enters the conversation at all is that the payment surface has changed. The UK has over 150 million contactless cards in issue, and contactless accounted for 76% of all UK debit card transactions in March 2024. Those are adoption figures rather than fraud figures: three quarters of UK debit card transactions are now a card held near a reader for half a second.
So the wallet question is narrow and answerable: when your cards are in a bag on a train, can something be read from them at close range. If you want the evidence rather than the marketing, we published our full answer on whether RFID wallets actually work and we did not tidy up the awkward parts. And if you would rather keep a wallet you already love, the VAULTCARD sits in it and does the job differently: powered by the scanner's own field, no battery, it senses a reader and emits an electromagnetic jamming signal that blocks readers from reading any RFID card within 4 cm of it.
The recommendation
If you carry 4 to 8 cards and want the shielding built in rather than added, the Chelsea RFID-blocking wallet is the one we would put in your pocket. Its lining is there to stop a reader held against the outside of the closed wallet from getting a response out of the cards inside, without you doing anything at all. That last clause is the point: safe card practices fail when they require daily effort, and a lining does not need reminding.
It is the right choice if your cards live in a bag or a jacket in crowded places, and if you have quietly given up on carrying the thick wallet you were given years ago. It is the wrong choice if what you actually want is a passport-and-cards travel case, or if you carry 12 cards and will not thin the stack, in which case a slim wallet will simply make you cross with it by March.
What none of it replaces: the hand over the keypad, and the 2 minutes with the statement.
Verdict
The crew charged in Brooklyn is alleged to have run for nearly a year against more than 600 people before the indictment landed. Treat detection as something you do at home, on a screen, on a schedule. Treat prevention as 3 small choices: a machine somebody owns and services, a covered PIN, and cards that are not readable at close range while you are standing on a platform with your bag against a stranger's.
If the third one is the gap in how you safeguard your wallet, our RFID-blocking wallet range is where to start.