The problem of credit card skimming is now the cause for international losses of over one billion dollars a year. It is more commonly used in Europe, Asia and Latin America, however, this particular type of credit card scam is starting to be used in the United States.

It can be easy to run a credit card scam, such as this, when you give your credit card to a store employee in order to make a purchase. When the store employee swipes your card for the purchase, it could also be swiped across a small machine in their hand called a skimmer which stores the information on your card into its own system for the store employee to use to steal from you. The skimmer can retain the information on hundreds of debit and credit cards and then it is used by unscrupulous people to print counterfeit cards.

There are skimming rings working nearly in every corner of the world and as soon as your information is put into the skimmer, it is then downloaded into a computer and is ready to be emailed to anyone worldwide. The skimmers of the past were huge machines that had to be hidden under the counter and this made it harder to accomplish this type of theft.

The advances in technology in the past ten years, have made it possible to streamline the skimmer and make it small enough to be hand-held and out of sight of the unwary customer. The ease in which these skimmers can be purchased is in itself criminal, in that the machine used in the skimming process is offered over the internet for about three hundred dollars, however the machine used to print off the credit cards costs much more, an amount from five thousand to ten thousand dollars.

One form of credit card skimming is done directly through the card terminals by placing a skimmer bug into the terminal and then retrieved with the credit card information on it. The older credit card terminals are the ones that can be violated with this type of scam, but with the newer terminals this bugging has become much less prevalent.

The credit card thieves will quickly skim the information they need off of your cards and then begin to make their purchases with your credit card number. Much of the credit card fraud is committed through using the internet for purchases because of the increased popularity of online shopping. The thieves will use the internet to verify whether the card information is valid by making purchases of many low-ticket items through various websites in order to check to see if the card is active.

The real victim in this crime may be the merchant who had the employee who did the skimming, because the cardholder is usually only responsible for up to fifty dollars of the total amount charged on his card. The merchant is held 100% responsible for the skimming exercise and risks loss on the merchandise, and is responsible for paying the fees of the investigation. The money used by the credit card companies to offset the cost of investigating charge-back claims by their customers, comes from the investigation fees paid by consumers using credit and businesses.

Those who do this skimming scam operation know that a purchase of at least 00 must be made before a criminal investigation can begin.

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