Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Ruby Tuesday serves a blow to credit card skimmers

Ruby Tuesday is doing something about credit card fraud. They announced yesterday that they will be introducing an ultra-secure (encrypted) credit card system to protect their customers from fraud.

The AP is reporting:

The system, which is expected to be in all the restaurant chain's 900 locations by April, leaves no credit card information at the restaurant and is instead sent to the bank in encrypted form. The system is said to help prevent identity theft.
Criminals (some say of the organized type) have been targeting a lot of unprotected information, recently. Some of this information is bartered in underground chat rooms set up for this purpose.

Of note, Visa International commented that the new system is fully compliant with PCI data protection standards.

AP story, here.

If you would like to see the sheer volume of recent data breaches, Attrition.org has a chronology, here.

If you would like to see how easy it is for your payment card information to get skimmed at a restaurant - you can view an interesting video, here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've seen the scam they do when you give them a card, another swipe across their own skimmer, and bingo they get your card #.
I'm even skeptical of the mailbox out in front of the house...anyone can take your mail! (even if it's a Federal offense).
The mail delivery here goes to a locked postal area. Or having a mail slot in your door, or a P.O. Box seems more secure.

Keep up the great investigative reports Ed!
FTGF!

Ed Dickson said...

Daniel -

You just gave me an idea for a post.

Anonymous said...

I've always felt weird about giving my credit card to those low paid guys at restaurants. Everyone is so onsessed with Internet security but they forget that it's much easier to use your credit card information if you actually hand them your plastic.

Anonymous said...

Yes we are miles away from a credit card safety world. I don't know when will credit card safety meet it's optimal point. I use only single time usable netsafe card for internet payments. It's much safer than producing giving my plastic card details to others.