Crime and Crooks

There are two ways to skim your card - someone does it to you or you do it to yourself. The remainder of this post covers the first scenario.

When Do They Skim Your Card?

Whenever your card leaves your possession, it's at risk to be skimmed. The most common place to be skimmed is at restaurants. Food servers can carry skimmers in their aprons or pockets and quickly run your card through as you wait for your bill at the table. You'll never know they've done it when your card is returned with your charge receipt. Skimmers are often paid by an identity theft broker to collect the data which they then resell at a much higher price online.

Once your data is bought, your nightmare begins. You'll be spending hours with your creditors explaining why you couldn't have made those purchases and signing affidavits for the investigating agency. Sure, your cards all say, "zero fraud liability", but that doesn't mean you won't have to go through all the motions.

Now, credit card skimming is bad enough but at least you can refuse to pay the unauthorized charges. Just imagine if your debit card is skimmed. My neighbor's check card was skimmed last year and several thousand dollars was stolen from her checking account overnight. It was payday and her entire check was stolen that evening when two suspects used her account to buy two mobile home generators at a camping store hours away from where we live.

This is why I say to you, never, NEVER, use your debit card for point of sale purchases. I know this defeats much of the convenience of having one, but once you have to work backwards trying to recover money that's already swiped out of your checking account, you'll agree an extra trip to the ATM is worth it. If you don't want to carry cash around, then at least only use your credit card. That way, your cash is not at risk.

There's much more to share about skimming. Come back for my next post in the Skimming Series and please share these tips with your friends. You could save them a world of trouble.

NEXT TIME: How you unknowingly skim your own card for the crooks.

Today the FBI released affidavits reading like a Dean Koontz thriller plot in the seven-year investigation of the 2001 anthrax serial murders of five people. Army scientist Bruce Ivins worked alone, investigators said. The case ties Ivins to the specific spores of anthrax used in the killings, the equipment needed to dry the poison and the particular pre-printed envelops used to mail it. The envelops were breadcrumbs of sorts. They had certain printing defects and were sold in Frederick, Maryland, the same city Ivins kept his post office box.

Motive, on the other hand, will remain speculative because Ivins took the deal with the devil and killed himself on July 29, 2008, by overdosing. Shucks. I hate when that happens. I would much rather he suffer a lifetime of humiliation and intimidation in prison. Ivins whacked himself after being notified he faced arrest charges for the killings under mounting evidence.

Among the dirty deeds he couldn't bullshit investigators about were unusually long hours working alone at night and on weekends in the days leading up to each of the mailings, discarding a book on DNA coding at his home while under surveillance and submitting fake anthrax samples to the FBI.

Two theories attempting to explain his his crazed behavior include Ivin's anthrax vaccination which was failing at the time of the murders and a history of marauding congress and the media with hundreds of complaint letters over the years.

It's amazing what investigators can do with the slightest of leads. Take the envelops, for example. It's likely Ivins never noticed the printing imperfection on the batch, else he'd have stopped using them. Who would think those envelops could be traced to one point of sale and further linked to the area of his post office box? Apparently he didn't.

I think it's dumb to use something so closely tied to oneself as a murder weapon. He was a scientist studying pathogens and specializing in anthrax, for crying out loud. Now Dr. Arthur Warren Waite, on the other hand, put a slippery spin on his murders. Way back in 1916, he used bacteria from genuine diseases to kill his in-laws. The natural reaction when someone dies from a common disease is not to suspect someone injected them with it.

Sneaky enough, but it didn't work. Waite fed his father-in-law diphtheria germs and got no results. He prepared a nasal spray for him full of tuberculosis germs and nothing happened. He gave him calomel to weaken his immune system, still nothing. He secretly blasted him with colonies of typhoid and influenza and finally in frustration turned to arsenic, after which he bribed the embalmer with $8,000 to keep his mouth shut.

The only reason Waite was discovered was because a woman in the know sent the victim's son a telegram about it. Check out the link, it's a kick from the 1916 New York times involving blackmailers, a violinist and the word 'scoundrel'.

I digress. In any case, it's always a pleasure to read about a murderer who's crossed off easy street, whether law enforcement gets them or they're betrayed from within, it's victory just the same.