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A few years back local law enforcement brought an interesting question to one of my labs: Why were hookers, tweakers, and thugs carrying around pockets full of hotel room keys? Busts of the local street ciminals were producing a virtual cornucopia of hotel room keys of all shapes and sizes. In addition, the cops found gift cards, rewards cards, player's cards, calling cards, membership cards -virtually everything that had a magnetic stripe on it.
It turned out that the magnetic stripes contained credit card information. The source data was either "skimmed" or "duped" from the original card and then recorded on the magnetic stripe of hotel room keys with widely available card reader/writers . Tthere was a burgeoning industry in this form of credit card fraud, with well-organized groups working within a moderately well-defined chain of command. The bottom-feeders were collecting the information and passing it up to the criminal leadership who then either imprinted the account information on the room keys, brokered the account information over the Internet, or traded the information with other criminals...
The first batch of discovered hotel room keys produced some confusion. Local law enforcement was not used to seeing so many hotel room keys on anyone. But after the credit card information was discovered, the proverbial light went on. In the State of Nevada it was illegal to possess more than two credit/debit cards in another's name. The criminals new if they were found with actual credit cards, they would be arrested. So their workaround was to copy the magnetic information onto the surrogate cards to avoid detection and detention. The jig was up when law enforcement found out what kind of information was on the hotel room key magnetic stripes...
Credit Card Forensics
It turned out that the magnetic stripes contained credit card information. The source data was either "skimmed" or "duped" from the original card and then recorded on the magnetic stripe of hotel room keys with widely available card reader/writers . Tthere was a burgeoning industry in this form of credit card fraud, with well-organized groups working within a moderately well-defined chain of command. The bottom-feeders were collecting the information and passing it up to the criminal leadership who then either imprinted the account information on the room keys, brokered the account information over the Internet, or traded the information with other criminals...
The first batch of discovered hotel room keys produced some confusion. Local law enforcement was not used to seeing so many hotel room keys on anyone. But after the credit card information was discovered, the proverbial light went on. In the State of Nevada it was illegal to possess more than two credit/debit cards in another's name. The criminals new if they were found with actual credit cards, they would be arrested. So their workaround was to copy the magnetic information onto the surrogate cards to avoid detection and detention. The jig was up when law enforcement found out what kind of information was on the hotel room key magnetic stripes...
Credit Card Forensics
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