I recently took a trip to India. Yesterday, in fact. While i was there, i made a very large grocery store purchase, filled up my gas tank, and visited several pharmacies. It was a quick trip, and before long, my credit card stopped working and i had to come home.
Of course, it wasn’t *me* in India. Someone was using a counterfeit version of my credit card. Citibank called me mid-day to ask if i had authorized these purchases. We then set about closing my account. I still have to jump through a few hoops and submit some forms in order to make sure i’m not responsible for the charges. Overall, the process was efficient, and i’m glad Citibank caught it.
I learned a few things. The Citibank folks were pretty confidant that i had been a victim of “skimming”. Skimming occurs most often when a dishonest employee of a restaurant, say, takes your credit card for payment and then also swipes it through a personal hand-held reader that stores the number. They can then create a counterfeit copy of the card. These skimmers are also sometimes mounted onto ATMs on top of the normal swipe spot (sometimes there is a camera too, watching you enter your PIN), and customers unsuspectingly give their numbers away. Scary.
Aside from using cash to pay for restaurant meals, i’m not sure how to avoid this kind of thing. Of course, i’m jumping to a small conclusion in assuming it was a restaurant… however, i use this particular credit card *only* for restaurants. And practically, in what other circumstance do you allow your credit card to be taken out of your sight?
In looking back over my statement, i can see all the restaurants at which i have used this card recently. In the past two weeks, i have eaten at exactly one restaurant where the card is taken by the server at the end of the meal; that was 5 days ago. At all the others, i either swipe the card myself or they do it right in front of me. What can i say, we eat at a lot of cheapish pay-when-you-order places. In the month before that, i used the card at exactly two restaurants where the card was taken, and one of those was the same restaurant as the one from 5 days ago. It gives me a pretty good idea of where the theft occurred.
Interestingly, we had the same server both times; i remember because it was a person of indeterminate gender, and that is rare enough to be memorable.
None of this is proof. Perhaps the criminals are playing a deep game and they actually skimmed my number months ago. But it’s enough to make me very suspicious of this one restaurant.
I’m curious if my readers would take any action. Would you say anything to the restaurant manager? Would you go back and see if that person was still working there? Or would you trust that The System will put a stop to it? Wikipedia says that the big credit card companies have sophisticated data mining techniques that can identify the merchant where thefts are occurring, simply by looking at where the victims have common purchases.
It just makes me angry, that there are people out there getting by on Other People’s Money.
Behold, my ride for this week.