Have you peeled a credit card?

Banks tell us to "cut up your credit card" after closing an account. It's a safety precaution to protect against fraud once you throw the physical card in the trash. That guidance is at least 40 years old, though. It dates back to when physical credit cards contained only an account number embossed as raised numerals on a plastic card. That's back in the days when merchants would run a roller over your card that imprinted the physical number from the card onto carbon-copy paper. In the long-long ago there was no validation at point of sale... so a stolen card, even one belonging to a closed account, could easily be used in a sale.

Credit card technology has gone through a few generations of advancements since then. Even a lot of middle-aged folks today may never have seen a credit card roller machine outside a museum or one of those "People Under 50 Will Have No Idea What These Are" social media threads. The industry moved to magnetic stripes, instant validation, chips, and near-field communication (NFC) "tap to pay". But what about the guidance of cutting up your cards when you cancel your accounts?

Hawk and I still cut up our old cards. We're careful to cut the chip and the antenna mechanisms when doing it nowadays. But have you ever peeled a credit card? Skinned it?



Hawk did this with one of her old cards out of curiosity this week. It's one of those metal sandwich cards, the kind issued for some premium account types where, instead of the card being all plastic, it has a metal layer in the middle between plastic front and back. We know from years ago that these do really interesting things when run through a shredder. This time Hawk tried peeling off the plastic layers to get rid of the visual number and magnetic strip. What's left is that metal previously sandwiched in the middle!