Business Networking

Credit Card Skimming Is Big Right Now

The term credit card skimming might be a new thing for you but it is happening all around you. It is something you need to be knowledgeable about so you can try to prevent this thing from happening to you. It is not only a problem facing the United States but has been seen in other international countries such as Asia, Latin America, and Europe. This illegal practice has seen losses in excess of a billion dollars annually form the multitudes of credit card holders.

The credit card skimming scan is am easy one to apply. It occurs when you, the credit card holder, allow a store employee to swipe your card for a purchase. The card is not only swiped across the machine to pay for the purchase but is also swipes through a machine they hold in the palm of their hand. This swiping machine they use is very small but big enough to store all your important information from the card. The information is sent into their system for safe keeping until they are ready to use it. There can be literally hundreds of card numbers in this machine at one time. Counterfeit cards can then be produced with your information and looks like they are the legitimate owners of the card in question.

Skimmers can be found all over the world. Once your information is stored in the skimmer and saved into their computer system, it can be sent anywhere in the world via the Internet. Ten years ago, this illegal practice was not so easy to get by with as it is today. The skimmers were constructed in such a large fashion, they could not be held but had to be put under a counter. Micro technology has produced smaller skimmers that can be purchased for about $300 from Internet sites. The machine that needs to produce the new cards runs in the thousands.

If an individual chooses, they can also take the credit card information right from the terminal at the store. A device called a skimmer bug is put into the swiping terminal and is used to retrieve the information at a later date. New credit card terminals are immune to this illegal practice and only the older ones seem to be used.

Once the illegal numbers are retrieved using any of the methods above, the thief can use the information to go shopping all over the world for anything they like. They particularly like the Internet and purchases made online. This is one of the reasons credit card fraud is increasing on the Internet. Thieves will start out by purchasing items that do not have a large selling price to make sure the care is active and ready to be used. Since the Internet has real time processing, a person is not able to verify the holder of the card to catch them in the middle of this fraudulent purchase. It is almost impossible to catch the person who is doing it and the real owners of the credit cards do not even know it is happening until it is too late to do anything about it.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Credit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.