AbstractSmart and connected communities (SCC) is a new area of the Internet of Things with the potential to improve people's lives. The goal of developing SCC for a community is to encourage people to focus on the present, consider the future, and reflect on the past. In SCC, nodes (vehicles) can use their mobility to collect data from interconnected devices and send it to a variety of delay‐tolerant applications. Vehicular delay tolerant networks are an ideal fit for such services. However, the problem is that the devices and nodes (vehicles), having limited resources, may become unwilling to cooperate due to their selfish behavior. This article presents a reliable community card system (RCCS) with two main parts: a reliable community and community‐based card tracking system (CBCTS). The reliable community contains all trustworthy vehicles with a certain level of community reputation determined by their honesty level. In CBCTS, every vehicle needs a community card to participate in the network and the neighboring vehicles act as monitoring vehicle. The evaluation results show that the proposed RCCS is quite effective, with detection time and packet delivery. Similarly, it causes minimal overhead and energy consumption compared to all other existing techniques.