Friday, April 18, 2025

July 5, 2016

Three Ways You Can Tell A Scam Card Machine From A Real One [Images]

Handing over our card to be swiped these days is second nature, but maybe we should be a little more vigilant when doing so.

When you go to a nice restaurant for a drink and a feed the last thing you expect is to be fleeced by your waiter, although that’s exactly what happened in Camps Bay last month.

You can read the details on how a waiter tried to take a patron for R60 000 HERE, but let’s play safety officer on this one.

Apparently these crafty criminals use card skimming machines to pull off their heists, but there are three ways one can tell them apart from the real ones.

So here’s MyBroadband with the three – don’t worry, we’ll explain below:

cardskim

This from the comments section:

The top image indicates how deep your card goes into the device. Just more than halfway. Any deeper and you have a skimming device.
The middle image just indicates how slightly larger the skimming device is than the proper device. If you are familiar with these devices then you can tell the difference.
The lower image shows an unlit keypad compared to a lit key pad. Skimmers want money and aren’t interested in touch sensitive lighting on keypads.

Use it, don’t use it, we just thought we’d give you the heads up.

Just remember to treat your waitstaff with respect, they’re actually people too.

[source:mybroadband]