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Hide Your Hands at the ATM to Thwart Card Skimmers

by Terrence O'Brien on September 26, 2010 at 01:00 PM

Hide Your Hands
The smarter breed of ATM crooks (i.e., not the type that try to cart off an entire machine with a backhoe) favor tools like card skimmers and pinhole cameras. Authorities in the U.K. recently seized the contents of one such camera, and it reveals a rather simple way to thwart these hackers: hide your hands. In order to work, skimmers require customer carelessness, and the crooks hope that you don't notice the tiny camera recording your hands.

The footage (after the break) shows the thieves installing the device, as well as a series of customers entering their PINs. The first batch of patrons enter their codes in plain view of the camera, and there's no problem discerning the access codes for their accounts. The second group, hip to the skimmers' tricks, hide their digits with their other hand, wallet, or whatever else they happen to have handy. The lesson here, as usual, is to be paranoid. Hide your hands, and, even if you missed the bulky reader glued to the front of the ATM, the crooks won't be able to easily take your cash.

Tags: atm, atm skimmers, AtmSkimmers, cardskimmers, security, top

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