Our guest expert identity theft, Robert Siciliano, is quite vigilant in its attempts to keep readers informed about the dangers of ATM skimming, and other scams that can lead to identity theft. When you think of skimming, the first thing that comes to mind is perhaps an ATM which has been altered, but as Robert Siciliano pointed out in his latest post, there are other ways for thieves to skim data from your credit card, such as when you hand it to a store clerk to make a purchase.
Last week, two men and a woman from Colorado had been convicted of a number of financial crimes, including identity theft and racketeering. They stole the gym lockers of credit cards in a number of different gyms, skim credit card numbers stolen cards, then loaded the numbers stolen on old credit cards, which they used for shopping in various stores, including Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Toys-R-Us. They also used the credit card skimmer to steal customer credit card numbers to a local Taco Bell. Although this scam particularly ended, it is interesting to note the ease with which criminals could travel credit card numbers without the knowledge of their victims.
As we have said repeatedly in NextAdvisor.com, one of the best ways to protect yourself against this scam is to check your bank statements and credit card often, and refute unauthorized charges within 60 days. You should also consider investing in identity theft protection, helping to prevent and detect fraud the new account.