Credit Card Skimming May Hit Your Credit

There are losses of over one billion dollars each year, due to the international problem of credit card skimming.This common type of credit card scam is happening in Europe, Asia and Latin America and is starting to be encountered in the United States on a more frequent basis.

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 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 be downloaded into a computer and emailed to any worldwide location, as there are skimming rings working all over the world.The skimmers of the past were huge machines that had to be hidden under the counter and this made it harder to accomplish this type of  theft.The improvement in the technology of the machines used in this skimming process over the past ten years has made it quite easy to hide the hand-held skimmer out of the sight of the customer who is interested in making the purchase.These credit card skimmers are easy to buy, as they can be purchased over the internet at around three hundred dollars, but the machine used to make counterfeit credit cards is a much larger investment, which costs in a neighborhood from five thousand to ten thousand dollars.

This type of credit card skimming scam is done in another way; the credit card information is pulled directly out of the card terminals by inserting a skimmer bug and later taking it out with the 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 secured the needed information on your credit card account, they will quickly go on their shopping sprees and charge it to your credit card number.Over half of credit card fraud is committed over the internet, as shopping by this method is becoming more and more popular, card fraud on the internet has also increased. 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 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 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 and businesses.

Those who do this type of  skimming scam operation know that a purchase of at least $2000 must be made before a criminal investigation can begin.

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