I didn’t see this in europe yet, but in the USA some credit cards now have a small radio frequence chip that allows you to use the creditcard in new payment systems where you just put your creditcard in front of the machine.
Creditcard number, ID of the cardholder and expiration date are sent by radio frequance to the payment machine.
To avoid other people catching this precious radiofrequenced information, the Armadillo card shield was developped. It can be printed with a company logo and protects the precious card from being read by others.
Click here to see the video and website, it took me 5 minutes to understand what it all was about, but that’s maybe because I’m from the old continent. www.armadillocardshield.com