SWIPED!

 

These guys are slick.
They swipe your ATM card info on Monday,  then wait until the weekend to use it.

That way, the banks won’t be monitoring suspicious activity.

And you won’t get the SUSPICIOUS ACCOUNT ACTIVITY alert in your inbox until  Monday…or two thousand dollars worth of withdrawals later.

And of course, the phone number on the email in your inbox is incorrect, which leads to forty five minutes of telephone prompts.

And finally, when you get to the correct person -who once again needs the last four digits of your social–she drops the call.

Yes, my ATM info was swiped.

It was swiped when I used the free standing ATM (in the entrance area of the Treasure Island on Broadway).

The thieves put a piece of paper into the scanner, which somehow read the numbers on my inserted card. Then, there a tiny camera mounted near the pin area nabbed the PIN of my card and others in desperate need of cash to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

I went into the bank on Monday morning to report the fraud, in order to get my money back.

I found this odd,  since it was my bank that reported the fraud to me.

 “This is how I spend my Monday mornings,” the bank officer chuckled. “And to think most people just report the fraud online.”

His advice on preventing bank fraud?

• Don’t use free-standing ATM machines, even if they are inside of a trusted merchant. These machines are not checked daily for suspicious malware or swiping schemes.
• Request an ATM card over a debit card.
• Put all purchases on a credit card. They have automatic fraud protection.

 

Will the card swipers get caught?

“Card usually get caught when they deposit a large amount of cash into their skimpy accounts,” the banker explained.

So they pour all of their ingenuity into how to swipe money out of an account, then act like numb nuts when then depositing it into their own.

Maybe the best place to keep valuables is behind a painting.

…or inside a jigsaw puzzle box of a famous painting.

Low tech, high security. Thank you, Mona!