Canada Facing Trouble with Card Skimming

I don’t know how many of you have been keeping up with the news out of Canada lately, but they sure have had a mess on their hands. Recently, they busted a ring of thieves that were creating fake credit cards. But, these problems have been going on for quite sometime and don’t seem to be getting better.  A most recent story in the Canadian news told of a man that had been “skimmed.”

With the crime of skimming, the thief simply uses a machine to steal your credit card or debit card information when you use the card. That’s right, all you need to do is simply use your card and the information can be skimmed and easily stolen.

With the newly skimmed information, the thief simply creates a new fake credit card containing your information. So, it spends just like your card and looks like the real deal. The financial industry in Canada estimates that there are currently about 260,000 fake credit cards floating out there and in use. When compared to the 61.1 million total cards being used in the country, this is a small percentage. But, 260,000 is still a mind-boggling number. And, in 2005, the financial industry had to repay about $70 million to customers that had been victims of skimming – that’s a lot of money, whether you are talking Canadian dollars or not!

According to those that have been victimized by these skimmers, the credit card companies are remaining tight-lipped with the details. They simply call the victims, tell them security on their card has been breached, and issue a new card. No details are provided to the victim. So, they have absolutely no idea when they may have been skimmed or what the thief used the fake card to purchase. As you might expect, consumers are feeling a little apprehensive by the boldness of these skimmers and the relative lack of support provided by the credit card industry in the aftermath.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Card Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.