Posted on Sunday, 27th February 2011 by Charlotte W
During the summer credit card scammers were out in full force, but one of the newest ways they are trying to steal your credit card number is by attaching a technologically sophisticated data collection device to card readers in gas pumps and ATM machines.
The gadget is known as a “shim” because it is relatively thin piece of hardware that resembles the shims used by carpenters or stone masons to fill a small gap in their cabinetry or stone wall. But in this case the shim is a small computer that records your credit card information as it occupies a gap in the slot in a gas pump or ATM machine card slot. These card reading skimmers are sometimes also connected to a wireless communication device, so that thieves can retrieve the data stored on them from a device like a smart phone. According to an official statement to the media issued by Diebold, a company that manufactures ATM machines, “The criminal act of card skimming results in the loss of billions of dollars annually for financial institutions and card holders. Card skimming threatens consumer confidence not only in the ATM channel, but in the financial institutions that own compromised ATMs as well.”
Here’s how it works. The crook will insert a rather thin and flexible circuit board through the same card slot that you use to swipe your card. To do so the circuit board is first attached to a blank card that looks like a credit card. The computer device then sticks to the part of the ATM or other card reader that scans your card, and the blank card used to insert it is removed. Once it is inside the guts of the card reader the circuit board becomes a sort of go-between that gathers information from your card, stores it for the thieves to use, and then lets your transaction proceed. When these devices work correctly the card user doesn’t notice anything fishy, which is what makes this kind of scam so diabolical and attractive to criminals.
But these are no ordinary street criminals, because the engineering that goes into making these special shims is extremely sophisticated. The device needs to be very flexible and also needs to be thinner than a grain of salt. They are actually thinner than most strands of human hair. You could stack about 75 of these ultra skinny circuit boards on top of each other, for example, and they would still be thinner than a normal credit card – so they are about like cellophane tape.
After the data is collected on the thin shim the criminal can come back later to retrieve it. One of these shims was found in a gas station pump, for example, but the pump had been opened up using the kind of key that only a gas station manager or government inspector would have. Instead of using a special piece of plastic to insert it through the card slot the scammer had opened the pump, taped the device inside it, and then closed the pump so it was hidden from sight. Someone got a universal gas pump key capable of opening lots of gas pumps and then they began inserting shims that they could later come back and collect – once the shims were full of private credit card information. Deputies found similar devices inside gas pumps all up and down the highways of Florida, for example, during the busy summer tourist season. The United States Secret Service was called in and they are continuing an investigation into this shimming practice.
The use of shims started in Europe some years ago, but the Europeans wised up and have switched their credit cards over to a new “pin and chip” design. Instead of having a magnetic strip on the back these cards use a newer and much more secure type of technology. Each time the card is read the cardholder’s private information is encrypted, so it cannot be stolen and used by anyone who does not have the means to decipher the encryption. Many consumer groups have been urging banks and card companies in the USA to convert over to this better system, but financial institutions have resisted the move because they don’t want to invest the money it would cost to install new card readers. So the practice of skimming has virtually ended in Europe while criminals are just getting ramped up with this kind of scam here in the USA where our credit card technology is rather old fashioned.
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Tags: Card, Credit Card
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