How to Prevent Being Scammed!

I remember a very scary day in my life when I went to pay for a bill and realized that there was no money in the account. It is a very vulnerable feeling to know that what you thought was in your bank account is gone with out a trace!

Of course after much investigation the bank found out someone had cloned my card and used it to empty that account. Fortunate for me, that account had very little money! In fact it made me chuckle a little to how I had foiled the thieves when they realized  the paltry amount they had stolen.

Of course not everyone is so fortunate and this kind of scamming can devastate person’s lives as they are often cleaned out of their life savings.  How do they clone cards? How can we protect ourselves?

Cloned Cards

Some thieves use a special machine to record all the data on a card so they can they take money from the victim’s account.  This is  most often placed on ATM card slots, but criminals have been known to put them on any machine that accepts debit and credit cards.
Some less sophisticated methods require the criminals to capture your PIN separately, and so they will install a tiny camera pointing at the keypad. These cameras are often built into a false front on the machine and can be extremely difficult to spot.

Tags: scammed