[icebraining]

Perhaps I'm underestimating the difficulty of cloning cards.

I don't know how the bank cards work, but here in Portugal we now have a citizen's ID card that looks much like a bank card and can actually do cryptographic operations itself - it has a private RSA key that it can use to sign and encrypt data by request of the card reader. It's essentially impossible to clone the card, at least without breaking it.

EDIT: According to this article[1], PIN-and-chip bank cards are similar to what I'm describing.

[1]: http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/outdated-smart-c...