Theft of valuables

Hi Carole. There is a miniscule chance of this happening, and no more in Europe than in US. Drop this from your list of things to worry about. :) You are 100 times more likely to just plain lose your credit card. And it that happens, just call the credit card company and they will cover all charges! Have fun in Europe!

One proven way to avoid any credit card problems --- kind of 19th Century -- pay cash. Cash is still king in Europe and often gets you a discount. On our last two trips (33 days, 17 days) we only charged two items. On the one trip a hotel room because they would not give a discount for cash and another trip near the end when we were managing our cash and wanted to bring a few euro.

There is fraud protection on all US credit cards, you are only responsible for $50 in un authorized charges if you let the company know in a timely manner. Sure it would be a hassle to deal with but it's not really a "valuable".

They have been around for a while. If your credit cards are of the type that can be remotely sensed than the distance can be a number of meters. If you credit cards are only magnetic swipe than the distance is greatly reduced. To put it in perspective, the bigger risk is when you use a credit card in the US at grocery stores, etc. where the information is transmitted unsecure from the swipe machine at the register to the routing device and possibley unsecure from the routing device to a server. Same thing when you used your credit card to obtain a boarding pass from a kiosk. If you are comfortable doing either of these, then it does not make much sense to worry about a remote scanner since it is far less likely to occur. Edwin

Carole, That type of theft is only possible with cards that use RFID (Paypass) technology (they have a small "signal strength" logo on the card). You might check your cards to determine whether you currently have any of that type. This is not a problem with the "chip & PIN" cards (AFAIK) as these require physical contact with the reader (not that this will be an issue unless you've recently opened an account with a branch of the Royal Bank in your area, and applied for a "chip & PIN" card). If you do have RFID cards, you might have a look at This Website for products that supposedly block the ability to "read" the cards. I don't have any information on how well these work, so you'll have to do some research on the subject. Happy travels!

That RFID cards can be "scanned" by a criminal using some sort of radio device is an urban legend. The RFID chips used in debit/credit cards used the same exact encryption that chip&pin cards use. In addition RFID chips have some sort of security feature that will disable the chip should something suspicious occur.....sort of life a self-destruct mode:)

Thank you all very much for the info. I'm happy to say this is one less thing to think about!!!!!!!!