Plastic and plastic-based transactions are incredibly vulnerable to fraud. Your cards can be stolen, or the information off the magnetic stripe can be duplicated without your knowledge. All a thief often needs to make a purchase over the phone or Internet are your account numbers and expiration date, information that’s often printed right on your receipt by clueless merchants.

Those realities are leading some retailers and banks to look for payment methods that are a lot more secure. A few experts predict plastic itself will someday be as obsolete as pieces of eight, replaced by everything from radio-frequency chips in cell phones to fingerprint scans.

By Liz Pulliam Weston at MSN Money.

[ Read more ]