Some asshole in Los Angeles, a place I haven't been to since February 2005, managed to somehow get a hold of my Amex card information. This is a card I literally only use at three or four places ever as my gas/groceries card: To buy groceries at one particular Safeway and gas at two stations near my house and sometimes one near work, and somebody across the country was apparently able to forge a swipeable physical copy of this card to use at a gas station.
The US needs to hurry up and abandon the magnetic stripe for EMV, it's way too easy to skim and then forge a stripe-card. Unfortunately gas pumps aren't required to have EMV readers installed until October 2017 though because it's prohibitively expensive to retrofit these systems to existing pumps and then get them recertified by the state, so the card thieves will continue to hang skimmers over the card slot on gas pumps while they still can
Last edited by _j5689_ (2016-09-16 08:01:07)