ATLANTA — It’s like high-tech pickpocketing.
The bad guys just need to stand close to you and then they are able to steal the information from your credit card and you don’t even know it.
Channel 2 consumer adviser Clark Howard has been warning about credit card and debit card skimmers for years. But as technology improves, the skills of criminals do, too.
They could access your money with a simple tap. Even the name is a little spooky: Ghost tapping.
Fraudsters are using a technology called “near field communication” or NFC. The tech is used for tap-to-pay cards and point of sale machines.
It allows data to be transferred from device to device, but only at a very close range.
“Most of the ghost tapping scams we’ve seen reported deal with these transactions that kind of happen on the fly,” said Gerry Mendiburt with the Better Business Bureau. “And another one we’ve see deal with someone kind of randomly approaching you on the street asking you for a donation.”
Mendiburt says in these cases, you think you’re paying one amount and only later realize much more was charged.
“And at that point it might be too late depending on how you pay for that transaction,” he said.
“They handed me a receipt and I said, ‘Don’t I have to pay? And they said no and I was like, ‘Hmm, OK, maybe somebody paid it forward,” said Carly Sargent, a ghost tapping victim.
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Sargent told Howard that no one paid it forward. Instead, she says the store she was shopping at charged her card before she had the chance to pay with cash.
“Driving home, my friend said look at your receipt and I looked at my receipt and they had charged my emergency Visa card,” she said.
A card she says she never took out of her wallet, now she keeps it in a protective sleeve.
“Keep daily tabs of your bank account and your transactions because if something wonky comes up the sooner you see that the easier it will be to dispute that,” Mendiburt said.
Howard says to use a simple NFC wallet, so you don’t have to worry about your information being transmitted until it is time to pay for something.
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