Credit card skimming is causing an international problem which accounts for losses of over one billion dollars a year. It is more commonly used in Europe, Asia and Latin America, however, this particular type of credit card scam is starting to be used in the United States.
This is an easy credit card scam to run when your card is used to make a purchase and it is scanned by the store employee at the store’s cash register. When the store employee swipes your card for the purchase, it could also be swiped across a small machine in their hand called a skimmer which stores the information on your card into its own system for the store employee to use to steal from you. The skimmer can retain the information on hundreds of debit and credit cards and then it is used by unscrupulous people to print counterfeit 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. The ease in which these skimmers can be purchased is in itself criminal, in that the machine used in the skimming process is offered over the internet for about three hundred dollars, however the machine used to print off the credit cards costs much more, an amount 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. The older credit card terminals are the ones that can be violated with this type of scam, but with the newer terminals this bugging has become much less prevalent.
As soon as the credit card skimmers have confiscated all of the information they need from your card, they will begin to make purchases of their choice with your credit card number. Online shopping has become more and more popular and this is the reason why so much of the credit card fraud is taking place over the internet because it is very easy for the wrong people to gain access to your credit card information. The cards validity is checked by the information thieves through their purchase of several low cost items from various websites to find out if the card is actually an active one.
The merchant who had the employee who did the skimming may be the real victim of this crime, but the cardholders are also victimized by being held responsible for up to fifty dollars of the total amount charged on their card. The merchant is responsible for payment of the fees for the investigation of the fraud which has taken place and he also is held one hundred percent responsible for the skimming activity and risks the loss of the merchandise. The costs of investigating the charge-back claims of their customers is paid by the investigation fees paid by consumers and businesses who use the credit card companies.
It is common knowledge of the criminals who perform these scams that a purchase of at least 00 must be made before an investigation is begun.
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