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Schemes Are On The Rise
Joe M posted in homelife, opinion on April 8th, 2009

Attack of the Card Skimmers, an article on Gizmodo has some interesting photos

It seems that card skimmers are everywhere these days.

A card skimmer is a small device that can be placed over the card slot on an ATM.  It captures the magnetic stripe information for a thief.

The thief returns later, removes the skimmer, and it contains all of the card info that it has captured while it has been covertly installed.

The info can be reproduced on a counterfeit card, or sold to someone on the black market.

The masterminds behind this idea have gotten really clever, and the skimmer is hard to spot.  These days, they match the color, look and feel of the ATM.

In the article, the thief also used a pinhole camera to capture shots of PIN numbers being entered.

This is a reminder to all of us.

The economy is in a questionable state.  Theft and fraud are on the rise.

We can expect it to get much worse before the year is up, or the economy turns around, whichever comes first.

I also expect phone-related and computer fraud to rise.

I have gotten two automated calls in the past week.  Both calls were from ‘customer service at (Insert choice credit card issuer name here).’

Ironically, they were ‘courtesy calls’ to let me know my account number ‘had been compromised.’

The interesting thing?  I did not have accounts with either mentioned issuer.

With the popularity of text messaging and twitter, I expect those two forms of communication to become heavy-laden with attempts to dishonestly exploit any possibilities.

I have not gotten many, but I have received a couple of spam-texts on my cell phone, as well as a couple of automated spam calls.

Some time back, I wrote a post about phishing schemes.  Check it out for more information.

Not too long ago, I wrote another post on new, crooked schemes.

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