ATM and Card Fraud: Protect Your Money at Home or Abroad

From prodefence.org

It can happen quite elegantly. It can target you or it can target the bank as a whole. And, most certainly, it need not look like a scene from the heist film Heat. We’re talking about ATM fraud. This article explores the imaginative ways that scammers make use of ATMs to steal from cardholders, and what you can do to protect yourself, whether you’re trotting the globe or just down the street from your house.

Skimming

The practice of grabbing your card info from an ATM is called “skimming”. This usually involves devices that have been (rather easily) installed over the existing ATM hardware. These devices are either collected from the machine at some point or they transmit the data remotely, and fraudsters can then use the numbers they scan and collect to make a duplicate of your card. If you find yourself at a tampered machine, your use of the ATM will proceed as usual; you can get out the money you want, but the scammer is getting access to your card to presumably plunder much more. Let us now examine some popular methods of skimming.

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