Heads Up: Hacks of credit cards surge at tanks

  • [photo by Patric Hedlund, The Mountain Enterprise]

    [photo by Patric Hedlund, The Mountain Enterprise]

By Patric Hedlund, TME

If you have purchased fuel using a credit or debit card in the last three weeks, run, don’t walk, to monitor transactions in your credit card and bank accounts. That would probably be most of us.

Scammers and Hackers

Scammers and hackers have taken another techno-leap forward. Your bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards and credit ratings are the targets. Thieves insert a nearly invisible…(please see below to view full stories and photographs)

Photo captions:

Sgt. Danisha Ashley with Senior Deputy James Simmons, Tuesday, Aug. 20 checking for any visible sign of tampering at a fuel pump. They didn’t find anything. Transmitting devices are used around the country recently.

The device shown above is a ribbon cable about 1/2” wide with a circuit board that is about the size of a human thumb. Thieves install it inside gas pumps or other card readers to intercept chip and mag stripe data. These devices often transmit via Bluetooth to some distance away, so thieves don’t have to go back to the scanner to retrieve data. Such devices (white cable in the center) are installed inside scanner electronics and cannot be seen from the outside.

Inside a fuel pump’s card-reading electronics

This cable normally plugs in here.

But this skimming device has been installed between the two normal connectors.

Circuit board (without the white cover seen at left), showing
chips.

Ribbon cable with connector used to intercept data

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This is part of the August 23, 2019 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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