Eli5 How do atm skimmers work?
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If you swipe a card through the reader at the store, it reads the card, and uses it to buy something.
If I was clever, I could duct tape two readers together, end-to-end, in such a way that you could swipe your card through both of them in one motion. You swipe your card only once, but it went past two readers now. So it buys two things instead of just one thing.
If I was even more clever, I could shrink the readers down so that they both fit into the size of a single reader. When you come to swipe your card, you only see one reader, so you think you’re buying one thing. But in reality, there are two separate readers crammed in there, making you buy two things.
A credit card skimmer is essentially a tiny extra credit card reader that nefarious people will stick onto the outside of or hide inside of genuine readers, so that when you stick your card through them, both readers see your card. As far as you know, you just used a single reader to do a single thing, but without your knowledge, a second reader has also read your card and can then use it to buy things just like the first reader can.
Usually they won’t actually make a payment right away at the moment of scanning. Many fraud detection hits would point to the infected reader and lead authorities straight to it. Instead, the reader will simply store the credit cards it sees in a list. The criminal can retrieve their skimmer and its stored list, get far away from where they planted it, and start trying those stolen cards one-by-one to see if any of them will buy something. Most probably won’t, as fraud detection is quite sophisticated these days. But some unlucky ones will. And there’s not really much to be done about the criminal as they and their skimmer are probably long gone by now.
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