Gas pump card skimmers
Got bit again. Both times the day after fueling up at a Sunoco station. This time the thieves made two $800+ purchases at two different Home Depots and a couple of smaller purchases at 7-11. Cancelled...
Forum Discussion
Flapper wrote:
Don't jump to conclusions about where/how your number was stolen. It may have been at someplace that got hacked a year or two (or more!) ago, and your number finally came up to be used. Very frequently, especially in the large breaches (Target, Home Depot, etc.) The thieves sell a huge batch of card numbers to others for resale. There are web sites where you can buy as many card numbers as you want. Then the purchaser makes their own cards, and takes them out for a quick spin - usually only a few places as the banks are pretty good about detecting questionable transactions. Frequently the purchase will be Gift Cards from convenience stores, which are untraceable, and therefore are then a guaranteed source of spending.
It's pretty rare for people using skimmers to turn it around the next day - they are gathering lots of numbers for their use, or for resale - so yesterday's gas station use is unlikely to be the reason you got hacked.
ALWAYS report this to the police! They may not be able to do anything specifically for you, but it aids them tremendously in detecting a pattern in an area, and being able to zero in on the bad guys. Just yesterday a pair from out of state were arrested after police were alerted that they were using numbers from last years Home Depot breech in our area.
Secondly - always demand a new card number from your bank! Most do it as soon as notified, but never assume...
The mandatory conversion to EMV chips in the cards this summer/fall should help reduce this kind of thing a lot!
I have had an account compromised and the bank would not tell me how if they even knew. So I agree. Just because that is the last place the card was used means nothing.
