All it can take is a swipe of your credit or debit card for your personally identifiable information to end up on the dark web.
Audio Transcript
Mollie Halpern: All it can take is a swipe of your credit or debit card for your personally identifiable information to end up on the dark web.
It’s called skimming and involves the installation of devices on ATMs, fuel pumps, and other point-of-sale terminals to steal your card data.
FBI Supervisory Special Agent Parker Still suggests keeping an eye out for pinhole cameras and other devices…
Parker Still: Observe your area. Instead of just blindly put your debit or credit card into the gas pumps or to the ATM, look at the actual device. See if something maybe stand out to you that this is just a little bit unusual.
Halpern: To help determine if an illegal overlay data capturing device is installed on a card reader, Supervisory Special Agent Zacharia Baldwin suggests…
Zacharia Baldwin: Look at your surroundings, inspect the area, know what to look out for. You want to inspect the two areas of the machine or the terminal that are most compromised—and that would be the keypad and also the card reader.
So, I suggest when you look at the card reader, inspect it and gently pull on it and tug it, and try to move it around, and if it moves, don’t use it. Find another one. I’d also suggest covering the keypad when you’re typing in your PIN code.
Halpern: Skimming is a pervasive crime that transnational criminal organizations are committing across the country in rural and urban areas alike.
It impacts your wallet—and causes billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy.
Still: We advise folks to monitor their credit. Check your credit. Monitor for any type of suspicious activity. Also, be in communication with your bank, have alerts set up where if a certain dollar amount threshold is used, that you get some type of alert. Just little things like that can go a long way in preventing a loss and a lot of hassle.
Halpern: With FBI, This Week I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.