Discussion Of Credit Card Skimming
Losses of over one billion dollars a year are now being suffered on an international basis because of credit card skimming. This common type of credit card scam is happening in Europe, Asia and Latin America and is starting to be more often encountered in the United States.
It can be easy to run a credit card scam, such as this, when you give your credit card to a store employee in order to make a purchase. That employee may swipe your card for payment, but may additionaly swipe the card with a small machine they hold in their hand known as a skimmer, that also stores information from your card into its system. This skimmer is equipped to hold information on virtually hundreds of credit cards, and from this information the crooks are able to produce counterfeit credit or debit cards.
After your information has been fed into the skimmer it can then be downloaded into a computer and emailed to any worldwide location, as there are skimming rings working all over the world. Just a decade ago, this fraud was not as easy to accomplish as it is today, because skimmers were very large and they had to be hidden under the store’s counters.
The advances in technology in the past ten years, have made it possible to streamline the skimmer and make it small enough to be hand-held and out of sight of the unwary customer. These skimmers are easy to buy; they can be purchased over the internet at around three hundred dollars, but the machine needed to make counterfeit credit cards is a much larger investment; costing in a neighborhood from five thousand to ten thousand dollars.
Another form of skimming is done by placing a skimmer bug directly into the credit card terminals and then retrieving it later with credit card information on it. With the introduction of the newer credit card terminals, this bugging scam is no longer the problem it can be with the older terminals which are much easier to violate in this way.
After the credit card scam artists have their needed information on you, they will quickly start their shopping sprees and charge it to your credit card number. Over half of credit card fraud is committed over the internet, with shopping by this method becoming more and more popular, card fraud on the internet has also increased. The information skimming thieves will check the credit card information for it’s validity is by making several purchases of low cost items on internet websites to find out if the cards are active.
The cardholder is one victim of this crime and is responsible for up to fifty dollars of the total amount charged on his card, however, the major victim in all of this is the merchant whose employee did the skimming. The merchant is at risk for the loss on his merchandise and is one hundred percent responsible for the skimmer’s activities and the fees charged for the investigation. The money used by the credit card companies to offset the cost of investigating charge-back claims by their customers, comes from the investigation fees paid by consumers using credit and businesses.
Those who do this skimming scam operation know that a purchase of at least 00 must be made before a criminal investigation can begin.
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