How Credit Card Magnetic Stripes can Lose your Account Data
Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physics professor at University of Texas at Dallas, shares interesting information about how your card’s magnetic stripe behaves in different environments and how the data it stores can be lost. Following is an excerpt of her interview with CreditCards.com.
CreditCards.com: We had several readers write in to say they had experienced loss of credit card data on the stripe when exposed to cell phones. Is there any truth in this, and if so, how does this work?
Diandra Leslie-Pelecky: “Any magnetic field can erase a credit card. The bigger the magnetic field, the more likely that you’re going to erase the data. Cell phones do have a magnetic field, but it’s pretty low.”
CreditCards.com: One reader had an MRI and said each one of his credit cards was deactivated after the experience. What caused this to happen?
Leslie-Pelecky: “The fields used for an MRI are huge compared to [all the other scenarios]. They tell you to leave everything outside the MRI – if this guy wasn’t told to do that, the technician wasn’t doing her job. The magnetic field is so strong that if you put a screwdriver in the room, it will draw the screwdriver across the room to the magnet.”
(Via CreditCards.com)
