A sharp-eyed customer in an unidentified Rockingham restaurant noticed something odd in the waiter’s hand after handing over his credit card. When police arrived, they seized a miniature skimming device, purchased over the Internet for $500.

Due to the customer’s quickness, the waiter had been unsuccessful in actually skimming the credit card. However, under Commonwealth law, even possessing a skimming device with the intention of obtaining someone’s financial data is an offense, and the as-yet unidentified 19-year-old waiter has been summoned to Rockingham Magistrate’s Court on 4 December.

Compounding the man’s charges, when police searched his home in Secret Harbour, they found a card encoder, used to make counterfeit credit cards from the data obtained by the skimming device.

The miniature card skimmer is small enough to be concealed in the palm of one’s hand. Although police don’t believe this skimming operation was successful, Detective-Constable Nicholas Armour of the major fraud division asked customers in restaurants and other establishments to remember the threat posed by such a small device. Customers should retain possession of their credit cards and swipe them themselves if at all possible, he said, and all credit cardholders should keep close tabs on their accounts to guard against fraudulent transactions.

A similar event occurred recently at a number of MacDonald’s restaurants in the Perth metropolitan area. In that scam, the EFTPOS payment devices had been compromised with skimming devices, capturing hundreds of customers’ credit and debit card information and PIN numbers, and fraudulently netting a criminal ring $4 million. EFTPOS devices in every local MacDonald’s had to be subsequently checked and cleared by police.

Source: au.news.yahoo.com