It says that the reader device has to be altered in order to do this. The people that did this had the knowledge to alter the device and money to buy the hardware to replicate the cards from the information retrieved, there is no electronic scheme on earth that can be protected from direct physical tampering like this. Magstrip cards are actually more insecure as all you need to do is tack on an addition to the slide reader to read the cards, and this can be very small. Software and hardware to write your own mag cards is also dirt cheap. At the very least the method used requires the thieves to invest a lot more money. Things like this will be possible with any system used, so it shouldn't be very astounding.