14 DAY TRIAL // Florida Department of Agriculture made checks at about 6,100 gas stations in the state and found 81 skimming devices at the point-of-sale (PoS) systems customers use for transactions.
A skimmer is a device concocted by crooks to be added to a PoS terminal and record the data when the payment card is swiped.
The technique is not new and the devices have been refined over the years to pass unobserved even by someone who inspects the card swipe opening.
Law enforcement receives information to start an investigation
The state-wide sweep extended from Miami-Dade County to the northwestern part of the state. The largest number of card data stealing devices, however, was encountered in the southern part of Florida.
The card data is collected automatically upon passing it through the PoS system. The latest versions of these devices have a battery that can power them for weeks, and the data is not stored locally, but sent to a receiving device that is available nearby.
A complete list with the gas pump locations where skimmers were found is available from Sun Sentinel news website.
According to the website, Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam has said that all the information about the skimmers has been given to law enforcement to investigate.
More customers pay with cash
It is unclear how the illegal devices were installed at the gas pump machines or for how long they have been gathering card information.
As a result of these findings, some people avoid paying for their gas directly at the pump and go inside the station to complete the transaction at the counter, using cash.
Shops should regularly check the integrity of their PoS systems, or every time suspicious activity is noticed near them.
In a presentation at the RSA security conference on the security of PoS devices, Charles Henderson from Trustwave and David Byrne from Bishop Fox showed a few examples of how crooks alter the genuine terminals to retrieve the card information.