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One Way Stolen Identities Are Used for Fraud

With hundreds of millions of charges being done daily through ATM and credit cards, one would hazard to guess that the technology securing them would be incredibly sophisticated. You would be wrong. Just focus on the black stripe.

The black stripe is known as the magstripe. It is an imprinting of magnetized particles that contains on the relevant information on the card holder that is needed to process a purchase, money withdrawal or any other task associated with the use of the card.

Given the serious cash being moved through plastic, the technology inbedded in the back of your cards must be very advanced right? Nope. Invented in the 1970s, it is as antiquated as a computer from 1980 compared to a laptop today.

So, how do identity thieves go about manipulating the magstripes to use stolen personal information? With the advances in technology over the years, it is incredibly easy. Much like using a CD Rewriter, they simply use a magstripe re-writer.

The magstripe device is so easy it is silly. It comes with software that lets you load the rewriter with the identity of someone. Swipe the card twice and that is it. You now have a new identity to use when shopping till you drop.

If this description gives you a sense of deja vu, it should. Pull out your ATM card from your bank. When you activated it at the bank, they had you swipe the card through a version of the re-writer, which loaded your info on to the card.

Ironically, cash is king for identity thieves. Why? Well, they don't want to be tracked, so they don't buy credit card blanks. Instead, they buy cash cards from banks with cash payment and then load your identity on those.

Once the card in question is loaded, it is time to do some serious shopping. The only way to get caught is if a clerk gets suspicous or the person whose identity is stolen puts a stop on their credit. This doesn't tend to happen for at least 30 days.

As technology continues to advance, the world of plastic transactions is going to come under more and more sophisticated attacks. While credit card accounts will probably exist for a long time, credit cards may not.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Aazdak Alisimo writes about identity theft for ArticlesonIdentityTheft.com. You can get a unique content version of this article.

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