There are losses of over one billion dollars each year due to the international problem of credit card skimming. In the United States this type of credit card scam is now being used although it is more commonly implimented in Latin America, Asia and Europe.

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. That store employee may also be swiping your card with a small machine known as a skimmer as well as using it to pay for your purchase; this skimmer takes your information from your card and stores it in this machine’s system to use fraudulently. This skimmer is equipped to hold information on virtually hundreds of credit cards, and from this information the crooks are able to produce counterfeit credit or debit cards.

There are these skimming rings working everywhere in the world and after your information is put into the skimmer it is downloaded into a computer and then it can be emailed to any location in the world. Just a decade ago, this fraud was not as easy to accomplish as it is today, because skimmers were very large and they had to be hidden under the store’s counters.

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. These skimmers are easy to buy; they can be purchased over the internet at around three hundred dollars, but the machine needed to make counterfeit credit cards is a much larger investment; costing in a neighborhood from five thousand to ten thousand dollars.

Another form of this scam can be done by pulling information directly from the credit card terminals, a skimmer bug is placed into the terminal and later retrieved with credit card information on it. The older terminals are the only ones which can be violated in this way, and the onset of new credit card terminals has alleviated much of this bugging.

As soon as the credit card skimmers have confiscated all of the information they need from your card, they will begin to make purchases of their choice with your credit card number. Credit card fraud over the internet has increased greatly with the popularity of online shopping because the credit card information can easily fall into the wrong hands through the web sites used. The information skimming thieves will check the credit card information for it’s validity is by making several purchases of low cost items on internet websites to find out if the cards are active.

The merchant who had the employee who did the skimming may be the real victim of this crime, but the cardholders are also victimized by being held responsible for up to fifty dollars of the total amount charged on their card. The merchant is responsible for payment of the fees for the investigation of the fraud which has taken place and he also is held one hundred percent responsible for the skimming activity and risks the loss of the merchandise. The investigation fees paid to the credit card companies by credit consumers and businesses they frequent is the revenue used to offset the costs of investigating charge-back claims by their customers.

Before beginning a criminal investigation into the skimming activity the ones who perform this scam know that a purchase must be made of at least two thousand dollars.

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