Beware of gas station card skimmers.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/07/13/urnidgns852573C4006938800025775F006C25AE.DTL

This story is no joke man. my wife called me this morning after she found out somebody siphoned over a grand out of our account this morning. Luckly after this happened the last time we use cash only most of the time and rarely use our debit cards locally. It was an actual card swipe so they were able to trace it to a card skimmer installed in a pump, at one of two gas stations that she used the card at.

We know it was either at a RaceTrac in Grand Prairie, or a crappy no name station a block away from our home in Euless.

These freaking thieves had me fuming when I read about these 'invisible skimmers' a few months ago, since this skimming crap has happened to us before, now im livid. I had to pay the bills today out of our savings... I'll get the money back but i'm broke for the next two weeks, yay, happy birthday me!

There supposed to be dispatching officers to both of these stations to investigate. I'll post more if they tell us what they find.

You shouldn't own a debit card. Someone uses your credit card they steal the banks money. Someone uses your debit card? They steal your money.

With Chase I got an ATM only card and cut up the debit card they sent me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by goofygrin

You shouldn't own a debit card. Someone uses your credit card they steal the banks money. Someone uses your debit card? They steal your money.

With Chase I got an ATM only card and cut up the debit card they sent me.

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Wrong. I've had charges against my debit card that weren't mine. Chase reversed them with no problem.

Of course they'll likely reverse them... but if you're like me and you keep very little in your checking and you start to bounce checks because some douche emptied your checking account then they aren't going to take care of that hassle for you...

Yep, this is an issue. We (the company for which I work) have changed the card readers on our hardware to encrypt the data that we send to our software, so if there is a skimmer in between, then it will not get useful data. I guess they could work long enough to break the encryption, but they will most likely move to somewhere else. Still, there is nothing to keep a person (waiter, salesman, and so on) from swiping your card on their own device on their way to our device.

I've been skimmed at RaceTrac twice. Once at the Jupiter-Garland location, and another at the North-Main in Houston location.

My bank won't issue me a plain ATM card, just a debit card. It's a stupid policy, but I'm going to need to switch banks when I move to Austin at the end of the summer anyway.

It's never happened to me at a racetrack, But I always pay inside, and not at the pump

i use one credit card for everything. i get points towards freebies, and i pay it in full every month. It works great for me, as everything is very easy to keep track of.

I always use debit for gas, so I may change that now.

I filled up at a Racetrack this weekend, and due to this thread used a credit card instead of debit.