Hotel Keycards Used As Credit Card Blanks For Stolen Numbers

Scams

from the no,-not-what-you're-thinking dept

The story about how hotels are putting your private info, including credit card data on the keycard used to open your room door has been proven as a myth many times over. It’s even gotten so bad, that hotels are looking at alternative technology, just so they can stop explaining to people that there’s no secret info on the keycards. Still, with that as background, it looks like some scammers are using hotel keycards — but not in the way commonly discussed in the urban legend above. Instead, they’re just using the keycards as if they were blank credit cards, allowing them to put stolen credit card info onto the cards. In other words, it’s not about getting the credit card info of people staying at hotels, but being able to quickly clone stolen credit card info for use in places where clerks are unlikely to look at the card being swiped (convenience stores, for instance). It’s kind of ingenious that criminals picked up on this — and apparently it took police a while to recognize what was going on. However, when every prostitute and drug addict they arrested seemed to have a pile of hotel keycards on them, they began to suspect something was up. It’s interesting to see this story come out on the same day as a study saying that credit card fraud is falling, mainly because of new security measures such as using smart chips and requiring the use of PINs to avoid fraud. It would seem that further use of both systems would effectively eliminate the use of hotel keycards as credit card blanks as well.