©Prafulkr™® · @prafulkr
4th May 2015 from TwitLonger
Police Are Beating Card Skimmers With GPS Trackers
You might think that the best way to fight card skimmers would be hunt them down and destroy them. But in California, at least, police have been leaving the skimmers right where they are—after they’ve fitted GPS trackers to them, that is.
Krebs on Security reports that the California police department has been fighting criminals by finding card skimmers—in this on gas pumps—then fitting small GPS tracking devices to them. Card skimming crooks invariably return to the scene, o grab their precious card details by physically removing the hardware. By tracing the signal from the GPS device, though, the police can now follow the crooks all the way home, as it pings its location every 6 seconds.
After a spate of skimming calls, cops in Redlands, California, decided that it was uneconomical to monitor all the gas pumps they were concerned about—hence the GPS decision. Early the morning after the GPS device was first fitted to a skimmer, the police were alerted to motion form the tracker—seeing it move at 50mph down a highway away from the gas station. Eventually the police caught up with the criminals, finding several more devices that tied them to a larger organized crime ring.