Already carrying a billion-dollar price tag, credit-card skimming continues to grow, with Indiana, Michigan and Ohio consumers among the latest targets. And a commissioner in Florida, where more than 150 skimmers have been found and removed at gasoline stations since March 2015, has had enough.
Commissioner of agriculture Adam H. Putnam filed legislation in November to help protect Floridians and visitors from skimmers at the pump and to provide better tools to help combat fraud. Skimmers are small, electronic devices inserted onto gasoline pumps, ATMs and other payment machines that copy credit-card data during purchasing.
Florida estimates 100 to 5,000 consumers are victimized by each skimmer, with an average of $1,000 stolen from each victim. Putnam’s proposed legislation would protect consumers by:
- Requiring self-service fuel dispensers to use certain security measures to prevent theft of consumer financial information;
- Increasing enforcement authority against those who possess or traffic fraudulent credit cards;
- Reclassifying the crime of unlawful conveyance of fuel, which increases the maximum sentence; and
- Increasing the offense level of the crime, which affects the sentencing guidelines.
Safety in numbers?
Attorneys general in eight states and the District of Columbia have taken their own steps to ward off fraud. In a November letter to top credit-card companies, they urged the required use of customer personal identication numbers (PINs) with new computer chip-enabled cards, Bloomberg reports.
While cards embedded with Europay MasterCard Visa (EMV) chips are a security upgrade from magnetic stripes, most of the new chip cards rely on a signature as the secondary form of verification.
“Signatures can easily be forged or copied or even ignored at the point of sale,” the attorneys general wrote.
The letter was led by Connecticut attorney general George Jepsen and signed by the attorneys general of Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia. They stopped short of supporting a federal or state mandate.
Visa “supports a choice in cardholder verification methods, giving merchants the ability to support PIN in addition to signature,” but cautions against technology mandates for payments.
“About half of store merchants choose not to support PIN today and more than 60% of transaction volume does not require a signature or PIN for low-risk, everyday transactions,” the company told Bloomberg.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.