That wouldn&#x27;t work.<p>Your assumption is that these retail companies are storing full credit card information in some large database somewhere, that is not the case at all. Most large retailers only store the full credit card information for seconds while they process the transaction, when the transaction is complete it is discarded.<p>What the criminals are targeting is the card terminals themselves. Meaning when you swipe your card, as the transaction is being conducted they take a copy of the information and re-transmit it to a host somewhere they control (or to a C&amp;C machine on that network, which they then exfiltrate somehow).<p>Plus even if you could get your &quot;gotcha&quot; credit cards into the criminal&#x27;s hands, the chance of law enforcement buying one back is tiny, since the stolen batch is mixed with other cards, and only then a small sub-set is sold (since they verify if the card is still active, and meets other conditions).<p>My point is, it just won&#x27;t work with the situation we&#x27;re dealing with today. Chip &amp; Pin may help reduce retail card theft as it is harder to reproduce a physical card to later use, and internet transactions should require the CSC which a brick and mortar store won&#x27;t record (even momentarily).