Pay-at-the-Pump Scheme Launches 10-Month Spree
Combating Pay-At-The-Pump Skimming
Some years ago, words like skimming, phishing, spamming, etc., were not common in the electronic world vocabularies. How the world has changed electronically is amazing. The more sophisticated technologies get, the men/women of the information age underworld get even super sophisticated at challenging the advancements and pose more cyber threats.
The financial/banking industry is one of the most vulnerable areas susceptible to different types of attack. Probably because “money is king” as the saying goes, therefore systems, devices, or persons that have access to it must be more prone to attacks.
Gray Taylor, a security and compliance expert for National Associations of Convenience Stores (NACS) says it bluntly; “the U.S. payment system is broken …, the magnetic stripe is the culprit.” Recently in Orlando, FL, a U.S. District court charged two suspected fraudsters for credit cards pay-at-the-pump skimming. The skimming fraud resulting in thousands of dollars spanned over 10 months of numerous fraudulent retail transactions with 175 credit cards at least. The good news is that the fraudsters were finally busted by a retail store’s surveillance and “banks’ transactional fraud-detection systems” when the suspects were making a $73,500 purchase. Other skimming crimes were committed at gas stations in Orlando suburbs.
Some of the banks that were victims included Chase and American Express. These cases are examples indicating that hacking and skimming U.S.-based magnetic-stripe accounts by criminals are growing. According to Jeff Lenard, NACS spokesperson, “pay-at-the-pump skimming is an issue the convenience-store and petrol industries are taking seriously.” To help retailers mitigate potential security breaches, NACS has launched WeCare Decals, tamper-evident labels for quick identification. They also recommended that retailers install video cameras for better surveillance, inspect pumps regularly to monitor tampering, and change pump dispenser locks because the older pump locks have same keys and inspection and collaboration are the best response to POS attacks. Hopefully the “WeCare Decal” mechanism and other recommendations would provide some desperately needed solution to curb magnetic-stripe cards skimming fraud.
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