Credit card skimmer detection tool tested
PATRICK Traynor, a cybersecurity expert, was in New York in February working with police to help identify a way to detect credit card skimmers on ATMs when he got a financial fraud alert: his own information had been stolen while he was in town.
It wasn’t the first time. In five years he’d had his personal information stolen by credit card skimmers — devices illegally installed on ATMs and gas station pumps that “skim” consumer credit card numbers — a half-dozen times.
“I’ve got 15 years of experience in the field of information security. If I can’t protect myself reliably, who else possibly can?” Traynor, a computer information science and engineering professor at University of Florida, said.
After three years of study, Traynor and two Florida graduate students invented a device they call the “Skim Reaper,” a credit-card thin gadget that slides into card reader slots and can quickly detect if an ATM or gas pump has been compromised. The New York Police Department is testing the Skim Reaper with some early success.
The Secret Service says skimmers steal more than a billion dollars from US consumers annually, money that often funds organized crime. Most credit card skimmers work by installing an extra “read head” inside or outside a machine. This extra read head allows criminals to make a copy of the card’s information as a consumer swipes it. Skim Reaper was built to detect when more than one read head is present, Traynor said.
The NYPD has four fulltime, trained detectives tasked with finding creditcard skimmers installed on ATMs at bodegas, but say the problem is too widespread to be stopped with those resources. “The problem is that it’s transient, they come in and place the device and move on,” Deputy Inspector Christopher Flanagan of the NYPD Financial Crimes Task Force said.
In February, Traynor gave NYPD five Skim Reapers to test. The device looks like a long credit card that can be slid into a card slot in a gas pump or ATM. It’s attached by a wire to a cellphone-sized box with a small readout screen that says “possible skimmer!” when multiple read heads are detected.