Over at Krebs on Security, Brian Krebs writes about credit card skimmer that was in use at Safeway self-checkout lanes in Colorado. The device allowed crooks to slip an overlay over Verifone terminals. Shoppers would run their credit card, punch in their PIN, and be none the wiser that their bank accounts were now exposed to fraud.
It's enough to make anyone a little suspicious. As Krebs writes:
My local Safeway in Northern Virginia uses this exact model of Verifone terminals, and after seeing this picture for the first time I couldn't help but pull on the terminal facing me in the self-checkout line on a recent store visit, just to be sure
If you're wondering why more and more places are now requiring you to insert a chip on your credit or debit card into a machine rather than just swiping, skimming operations like this are one of the big reasons. (Though even chip-and-pin machines have been successfully hacked.)
Krebs wrote in 2013 about a very similar device called a "Verifone condom." The device also fit snugly over a point-of-sale credit card machine. Krebs posted a video showing how quickly the device (absent the PIN pad reader or card reader for the purposes of the video) could be installed:
Source: Krebs on Security
