Clone credit cards

What Is Card Cloning? | cloned credit cards for sale

cloned credit cards for sale Credit card cloning or skimming is the illegal act of making unauthorized copies of credit or debit cards.

This enables criminals to use them for payments, effectively stealing the cardholder’s money and/or putting the cardholder in debt.

To do this, thieves use special equipment, sometimes combined with simple social engineering. Card cloning has historically been one of the most common card-related types of fraud worldwide, to which USD 28.65bn is lost worldwide each year – projected to increase to USD 38.50bn by 2023, according to Nilson Report.

How Does Card Cloning Work? | cloned credit cards for sale

Card cloning is a fairly elaborate criminal scheme. More specifically:

1. An accomplice is recruited – someone with physical access to credit cards e.g. a cashier, restaurant server etc.
2. They are given a skimmer – a compact machine used to capture card details. This can be a separate machine or an add-on to the card reader.
3. The customer hands their card to the accomplice, as payment.
4. The accomplice swipes the card through the skimmer, in addition to the POS machine used for normal payment.
5. The accomplice hands back the card to the unsuspecting customer.
6. The thief transfers the details captured by the skimmer to the magnetic strip a counterfeit card, which could be a stolen card itself.
7. The counterfeit card can now be used in the way a legitimate card would, or for additional fraud such as gift carding and other carding.

There are, of course, variations on this. For example, some criminals will attach skimmers to ATMs, or to handheld card readers. As long as their users swipe or enter their card as usual and the criminal can return to pick up their device, the result is the same: Swiping a credit or debit card through the skimmer machine captures all the information held in its magnetic strip.

Additionally, the thieves may shoulder-surf or use social engineering techniques to find out the card’s PIN, or even the owner’s billing address, so they can use the stolen card details in even more settings.