Skimming May Be The Biggest Concern To Your Credit Card
Posted at by ifydcat on category CreditLosses of over one billion dollars a year are now being suffered on an international basis because of credit card skimming. In the United States this type of credit card scam is now being used although it is more commonly implimented in Latin America, Asia and Europe.
This credit card scam is easy to run, as it can take place when you give your credit card to a store employee to purchase something. 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 little hand-held machine is set up to store the information from hundreds of debit and credit cards and this information is then used by counterfeiters to produce bogus cards.
There are these skimming rings working everywhere in the world and after your information is put into the skimmer it is downloaded into a computer and then it can be emailed to any location in the world. About ten years ago it was not as easy to accomplish this fraud as it can be today, because the skimmers were large, bulky machines which had to be hidden under the counter in the store.
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 only type that can be violated in this kind of skimming process and since the newer terminals have been utilized the bugging scam has all but stopped happening.
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. 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 thieves will use the internet to verify whether the card information is valid by making purchases of many low-ticket items through various websites in order to check to see if the card is 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 held 100% responsible for the skimming exercise and risks loss on the merchandise, and is responsible for paying the fees of the investigation. Investigation fees paid by consumers and businesses recently was estimated to be a half-billion dollars in annual revenue for credit card companies and this money is used by the card companies to offset costs to investigate charge back claims by their customers.
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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