How the ‘Skim Reaper’ Protects You From Credit Card Skimmers

Houston has been hailed king when it comes to credit card skimmers, and they’re not completely wrong. Houston is a hub for the skimming scam but the reality is they exist everywhere.

“My credit card got stolen for the sixth time in a three-year period,” professor Patrick Traynor, with the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, said.

And for this Florida professor – enough was enough. “These are the things that really scare me, these are called ‘deep inserts’ and these fit inside the card slot itself,” Traynor said. “There’s no way for you to tell that it’s there. It’s absolutely invisible.” So he recruited some students and they did something.

“We figured out what a card skimmer absolutely had to do to get your information and then we developed a device that used those characteristics against them,” Traynor said.

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