this modern life

News story this morning: A couple women are alleging there were skimmers for credit-cards at "two Sherman grocery stores" and that their card numbers got stolen and many charges caused in Arlington.

And of COURSE the news channel doesn't name the stores, so everyone who has bought groceries in Sherman with a credit card in the past week or so is wondering which one. And given that the allegedly fraudulent charges were levied in a city less than an hour from Sherman, I could see the credit-card companies not picking up on it.

(For a while, every time I ordered books from Folio Society - which is in the UK - or yarn from a Canadian seller I sometimes used, I would get calls from my credit card issuer wanting to know if I had made the charge. I once laughed and told the guy, "If the product involved is yarn or books, you can probably bet it's me")

I am somewhat irritated by this - why NOT name the stores, so people know. If it's a place you don't shop, you don't have to worry, or, conversely, if it is, it might mean you need to check up.

And honestly? If stores are not checking their credit-card readers daily (or better, a couple times a day), they deserve whatever opprobrium they receive from the public. Name them. But the news didn't.

So, you know me: I checked up anyway. For all three of the cards I use at different times.

No charges on any that aren't charges I made.

But now I wonder - could it be they're not 100% SURE this was a case of skimmer fraud, and that maybe they have to investigate? (I could see someone trying to claim "fraud" for charges they rung up, to weasel out of them. But then, I am inclined to be a suspicious wench).

But, how much extra effort that puts on honest people. And the stores - they need to watch their darn checkouts. Surely they have cameras trained on them where someone would SEE someone popping a skimmer over the credit card device? I know there are "here is how to spot a skimmer" websites out there, but frankly - at some stores the proper devices are so worn and janky it's hard to tell if they've been tampered with or not. (And if you're paying by credit card, you have no choice but to use the machines. And you can't tell me it's safer to walk around with a purse with $300 in it. If the criminals know you're carrying cash, you become a target. That's part of the reason I like credit cards: if mine were to get stolen, one phone call ends the damage, and in the couple cases I've dealt with personally, the charge gets removed. If I get $300 boosted out of my purse? It's gone forever)

I've also read lots of cases where wal-mart was the store with the skimmers (which makes me wonder if that's the store here) and yeah, wal-mart pays its employees badly and has too few of them so I can see them not really caring about credit-card skimmers or not.

Another annoyance: I thought forcing all of us to go to chip cards would prevent this. My Target Mastercard is the ONLY chip-AND-PIN card I have: the others have chips but just have me sign instead of entering a PIN.

And they're also reminding people of gas-pump skimmers. And yeah, I admit, this is one place I take a calculated risk: I LIKE pay-at-the-pump. It's faster, if I'm in an unfamiliar area (where I don't know what the safety level is) I don't have to walk across the parking lot and into the gas station office, and I don't have to interact with another person. I do have one low-limit card I try to use for gas, on the grounds of "if it gets stolen, the crook won't be able to do as much damage." (And yeah, the number has been stolen three times in the 20 or so years I've had the card, and two of those times I found out because my credit-card issuer called me about "unusual charges" - once, the guy asked me, "Are you in Las Vegas right now?" and I laughed and said "I am in my office in Oklahoma" and he laughed and said "I didn't think so, I'll cancel this card number and send a new one out to you")

But yeah, they're once again lecturing at us to "go into the store and pay in person" and that annoys me for several reasons:

1. Once again, honest people are being told to bear the effort-burden to prevent criminals. Instead, there should maybe be stiffer penalties - and penalties for gas stations, too, if they "allow" skimmers to be on their pumps. It seems so much in our modern world is set up so that the people who are honest wind up doing extra work to account for those who are dishonest, and it feels deeply wrong.

2. Like a dishonest store clerk has never stolen a customer's credit card number?

3. Sometimes it's pouring down rain and you don't want to have to walk across a long parking lot. Or you're a woman traveling alone in an area that feels hinky and you'd rather be close to your car so you could jump in and lock the doors if someone started harassing you. Or you're disabled in some way and getting across the parking lot is hard. Or it's one of our typical million-degree summer days and you will be a pool of sweat by the time you get there and back.

And anyway. Pay-at-the-pump is a good invention, it's one of my favorite innovations of the last 20 years or so, and it makes me mad that criminals have found a way to make people doubt it.

But yeah. People putting skimmers over credit-card readers to steal the numbers is one of those things, like scam telemarketing calls, door-to-door hustlers, and people texting-while-driving, that should not be in the world today, and yet, it is.