Visa has revealed its best estimates of the cost of payment card fraud in Australia, claiming it is much lower than in the rest of the world.According to Visa's senior director of risk services, Ian McKindley, if card-not-present fraud is taken out of the equation, card fraud in Australia costs around 4 cents per A$100. Contactless card fraud is lower again, coming in at around 2 cents per $100 according to McKindley.Internationally Visa claims fraud rates on everything apart from card-not-present transactions costs about 6 cents per $100.The Australian Payments Clearing Association does not track card fraud to such a detailed level, but in its most recent statistics for the year to June 2013, APCA said that there were 1.37 million fraudulent card transactions worth $280 million. That represents a fraud rate of 0.0234 per cent by volume, and 0.0461 per cent by value.This is a higher figure than Visa's but is the sum of proprietary and scheme cards and also includes online or card-not-present transactions.McKindley was responding to queries about a report last week on suggestions by Victoria police that there had been a surge in thefts of contactless cards. He said that in Australia the cost of tap-and-go fraud was half that of other cards despite 45 per cent of all face-to-face card transactions now being contactless.APCA CEO Chris Hamilton said it was possible Victorian police were seeing a rise in "opportunistic fraud" because criminals who had once looked to skim and counterfeit magnetic stripe cards were blocked by the rise of chip and PIN cards. These cards are harder to compromise and copy.Hamilton said this pattern had been seen in the UK following the introduction of chip and PIN cards."If you start converting the population to chip cards from magnetic stripe it shuts down the counterfeiters and skimmers. But the number of lost or stolen cards reported kicks up a bit."We infer that the fraudsters fall back on alternative frauds - but it is forcing them to less efficient frauds in card-not-present. This is probably not as much to do with contactless as to do with that. It's opportunistic fraud - you can't steal large numbers of them and it's hard to make large deals with them."Hamilton also responded to a query about whether data on contactless cards could be read by criminals without the holder being aware, for example by having a contactless card reader in a backpack held close to someone's bag or wallet."It's an understandable concern but there are not a lot of problems with it in practice," said Hamilton. "It is theoretically possible to scan data from a contactless card but the data that you get is not very useful - you can't make a transaction with that information. I've not yet heard of a systematic use of that by any criminal group."McKindley said that there was no evidence of such attempts in practice, and that in any case the scanner would have to be 4cm from the card, in order to be