You're in danger of being skimmed

It's bad enough crooks are stealing us blind at the pump, restaurants and ATMs, but we aren't even safe to walk down the street without someone stealing from us without us knowing it.

And no one is stopping them from selling these weapons online. They even show how to do make them on YouTube. You can't be sure if you're using a real keypad or a keypad being used to steal your pin number as you type it.

I am talking about card skimming, when crooks use a skimmer device to illegally collect information from the magnetic stripe of our credit, debit or ATM cards. Then they take the information, and copy it onto another blank card's magnetic stripe, to be used by a thief to make purchases or withdraw cash in our name.

Skimming works by replacing a card reader like an ATM, with a fake card reader. The counterfeit reader records all of the data on a credit, debit or ATM card as it passes through the skimmer. A camera is placed to get us typing in our code, too.

In addition to ATMs, other locations where card skimming happens include restaurants, taxis or other businesses where an employee will take the card from us to run the charge. The thief has fitted the card reader with a skimmer, or uses a hand-held skimmer hidden in a pocket.

This movie couldn't be embedded so you have to go see it.

And another one I couldn't show is how a wireless device works to steal your information. I couldn't put it on my site, because the person wrote a foul word on his screen when he filmed it. He bagged a device in a brown bag, sat it on a gas pump for a couple of days, it collected thousands of dollars for him in card numbers and money. He just had to go back and get the bag and download the info.

We need to be safer. We need to cover our hands as we punch in numbers. We need to look around and we need to make sure things look real, secure, before we use them.