Credit Card Skimming Is An Worldwide Problem

Credit card skimming causes a problem of international proportions, which accounts for losses of over one billion dollars a year.This credit card scam is common in Latin America as well as Europe and Asia, and now it is starting to be seen in the United States.

This is an easy credit card scam to run when your card is used during the time of a simple purchase and it is scanned by the store employee at the store’s cash register.Your credit card may not only be swiped at the register to pay for your purchase, it also may be swiped with a little hand-held machine known as a skimmer.The information in this skimmer is used by crooks to produce counterfeit cards from the hundreds of debit and credit cards it has information on.

After your information has been fed into the skimmer, it can be downloaded into a computer and emailed to any worldwide location, as there are skimming rings working all over the world.Only a decade ago, this fraud was not as easy to accomplish as it is today, because the skimming machines were very large and they had to be hidden under the store’s counters.Due to the great advancements in technology of the past decade, the skimmer is streamlined and the small hand-held machine is easy to hide from the view of the unknowing 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.

One form of credit card skimming is done directly through the card terminals by placing a skimmer bug into the terminal and then retrieving it with the 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.

The credit card thieves will quickly skim the information they need from your card’s account and then begin to make their purchases 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 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 on 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 and risks losing the merchandise, and also is responsible for paying the fees of the investigation.The costs of investigating the charge-back claims of their customers is paid through the investigation fees paid by consumers and businesses to the credit card companies.

Before beginning a criminal investigation into this skimming activity, the ones who commit this scam know that a purchase must be made amounting to at least two thousand dollars.

Visit JSNet.org for more information on credit cards and various credit card articles on how to protect your credit cards from fraud.