On a good day I can shower and get ready for work in just about an hour. On the rare occasion that I enjoy a single hour without interruption, I can research and write a rough draft for a short blog post.

In that same amount of time, two men broke into lockers at a Colorado recreation center, used a skimmer to copy account information off credit cards in the lockers, manufactured new cards using that information, and ran up $13,000 in fraudulent purchases.

Video cameras at the Wheat Ridge Recreation Center recorded one of the suspects entering the men’s locker room, while another man appears to be talking on a cell phone while he loiters in the hallway just outside the door.

An hour later, the thieves had added $7,000 to one credit card account, and $6,000 to another man’s credit card account.

Skimmers are small electronic devices that record the account information contained on the magnetic strips of credit and bankcards. Some skimmers are roughly the size of a matchbox and can be purchased for less than $200 from the Internet.

In identity theft cases where credit cards are stolen, the crimes are usually detected as soon as the victims realize their cards are missing. But, when the information from a card is copied with a skimmer, the victims continue to carry the cards themselves in their wallets, feeling blissfully secure … until the next time they attempt to use them and the cards are denied.

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Tags: identity theft, Skimmers

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under identity theft protection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.