Category Archives: All About Skimmers

Stealthy, Razor Thin ATM Insert Skimmers

August 21, 2014

An increasing number of ATM skimmers targeting banks and consumers appear to be of the razor-thin insert variety. These card-skimming devices are made to fit snugly and invisibly inside the throat of the card acceptance slot. Here’s a look at a stealthy new model of insert skimmer pulled from a cash machine in southern Europe just this past week.

Simple But Effective Point-of-Sale Skimmer

December 3, 2013

Point-of-sale (POS) skimmers — fraud devices made to siphon bank card and PIN data at the cash register — have grown in sophistication over the years: A few months back, this blog spotlighted a professionally made point-of-sale skimmer that involved some serious hacking inside the device. Today’s post examines a comparatively simple but effective POS skimmer that is little more than a false panel which sits atop the PIN pad and above the area where customers swipe their cards.

Nordstrom Finds Cash Register Skimmers

October 10, 2013

Scam artists who deploy credit and debit card skimmers most often target ATMs, yet thieves can also use inexpensive, store-bought skimming devices to compromise modern-day cash registers. Just this past weekend, for instance, department store chain Nordstrom said it found a half-dozen of these skimmers affixed to registers at a store in Florida.

How Not to Install an ATM Skimmer

April 24, 2013

Experts in the United States and Europe are tracking a marked increase in ATM skimmer scams. But let’s hope that at least some of that is the result of newbie crooks who fail as hard as the thief who tried to tamper with a Bank of America ATM earlier this week in Nashville.

Nashville police released a series of still photos (which I made into a slideshow, below) that show a man attaching a card skimming device to a local ATM, and then affixing a false panel above the PIN pad that includes a tiny video camera to record victims entering their PINs. According to Nashville NBC affiliate WSMV.com, this scammer’s scheme didn’t work as planned: The card skimmer overlay came off of the ATM in the hands of the first customer who tried to use it.