Wowtac W1

I received mine yesterday and am very impressed with it. Decent UI, good charging, tiny yet powerful, white color XP G2. All good for $15.99. One question I have is what are the chances of damaging my credit cards if carried in the same pocket? Has anyone removed the magnet in theirs? Not sure if it is glued in or simply held in by the tail spring.

From Wikipedia-
Magnetic stripe coercivity Edit

Detailed visualization of magnetically stored information on a magnetic stripe card (recorded with CMOS-MagView).
Magstripes come in two main varieties: high-coercivity (HiCo) at 4000 Oe and low-coercivity (LoCo) at 300 Oe, but it is not infrequent to have intermediate values at 2750 Oe. High-coercivity magstripes require higher amount of magnetic energy to encode, and therefore are harder to erase. HiCo stripes are appropriate for cards that are frequently used, such as a credit card. Other card uses include time and attendance tracking, access control, library cards, employee ID cards and gift cards. Low-coercivity magstripes require a lower amount of magnetic energy to record, and hence the card writers are much cheaper than machines which are capable of recording high-coercivity magstripes. However, LoCo cards are much easier to erase and have a shorter lifespan. Typical LoCo applications include hotel room keys, time and attendance tracking, bus/transit tickets and season passes for theme parks. A card reader can read either type of magstripe, and a high-coercivity card writer may write both high and low-coercivity cards (most have two settings, but writing a LoCo card in HiCo may sometimes work), while a low-coercivity card writer may write only low-coercivity cards.

In practical terms, usually low coercivity magnetic stripes are a light brown color, and high coercivity stripes are nearly black; exceptions include a proprietary silver-colored formulation on transparent American Express cards. High coercivity stripes are resistant to damage from most magnets likely to be owned by consumers. Low coercivity stripes are easily damaged by even a brief contact with a magnetic purse strap or fastener. Because of this, virtually all bank cards today are encoded on high coercivity stripes despite a slightly higher per-unit cost.

Magnetic stripe cards are used in very high volumes in the mass transit sector, replacing paper based tickets with either a directly applied magnetic slurry or hot foil stripe. Slurry applied stripes are generally less expensive to produce and are less resilient but are suitable for cards meant to be disposed after a few uses.

Thanks TT. Looks like CCs are ok around magnets then.

I don’t recall if it was this forum or another one, but I read a post from someone who knows way more about magnets than I ever will, and he went into great detail about the magnetic field strength required to wipe a modern credit card. Turns out it’s impossible to damage a credit card with any magnets I’m likely to ever own.