Credit card warning

Stephen Wilcoxon wilcoxon at gmail.com
Thu Jun 6 08:19:10 PDT 2013


That's only true outside the US.  We're still pretty much in the stone age.
 There are no chip-and-pin US credit cards (and virtually no readers for
such at merchants). The closest we come is chip-and-signature which is
harder to clone but still has the other issues of non-chip-and-pin.


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:48 AM, Darren Duncan <darren at darrenduncan.net>wrote:

> On 2013.06.06 1:37 AM, Peter Ezetta wrote:
> <snip>
>
>  Now, on to the fun part...  Very commonly, credit card theft is a
>> multi-tier
>> system.  At some point, you probably encountered a waiter or bar-tender
>> that was
>> less than scrupulous.  We are all too accustomed to letting our
>> credit/debit
>> cards out of our sight at bars and restaurants when we run a tab, or
>> leave a
>> card in a ticket book to be run by a waiter.  This waiter or bartender
>> will then
>> take your card, run it for your order, and also run it through a skimmer.
>>  Most
>> of the time, the transaction you made with the establishment will go
>> through as
>> expected.  This puts some degree of separation between the theft and the
>> legitimate transaction.
>>
> <snip>
>
> I've heard this said a number of times in the past, but I think the above
> notion is either outdated or region-specific now.
>
> In the last few years at least, if not longer, I've found, and I eat out a
> *lot*, that at every store I go to, and I typically pay with plastic for
> bills over about $10, that the concept of one's card getting out of sight
> basically never happens at all.
>
> In reality / modernity, stores or restaurants always want you to go to the
> register, or they bring a portable reader to you, and the card is run right
> in front of you, never leaving your sight.  In fact, often you're the one
> who puts the card in the reader yourself.
>
> So if a merchant is participating in a scam, it is happening using their
> regular card reader, which was probably hacked to steal information, but it
> works normally in front of the customer who sees the action.
>
> Around here I've heard cases of large numbers of stores having their card
> readers stolen by thieves, or surreptitiously being replaced by a hacked
> version of the same device, and so a merchant's reader could be stealing
> info and transmitting it to the thief and the merchant doesn't even know.
>  Some merchants protect against this by keeping an eye on their terminals,
> or hiding them away when not in use, or marking the bottom with some
> proprietary sticker or other marking that they regularly check, and whose
> absense might mean the terminal was replaced.
>
> But cards getting out of the customer's sight?  Maybe in the past.  But
> with the advent of chip cards which by necessity require the customer to
> enter a pin for them to be used, the customer has to be at the terminal for
> the transaction, and chip cards have basically replaced all the cards by
> now, so having the waiter taking the card out of sight is in the past.
>
> Or in regions that aren't up to date, and customers should be wary of any
> business whose reader doesn't support chip cards, or wants to take the card
> out of sight.
>
> -- Darren Duncan
>
>
>
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