Beware of the PIN pad

If you have a debit card and make purchases use those little terminal point-of-sale thingies that have a small keypad to enter your PIN number for your transaction, a rule of thumb:

Don’t enter your PIN on these terminals. The latest round of thefts, according to MSNBC, hacks into these terminals and retrieves the stored PINs from the system.

Most people don’t know this, but when you go to use a debit card for a transaction, you can still choose the “credit” option and sign your receipt. The purchase still gets posted to your bank account as if it were a debit transaction, but at least you don’t have to use your PIN.

I don’t like the POS machines anyway — I always forget which way to slide my card through, and sometimes the screen is hard for these old eyes to read. But now you have even more motivation not to use them.

0 thoughts on “Beware of the PIN pad

  1. Tage,
    I don’t see how this solves the problem that David mentions, which is that data can be ‘stolen’ from the machine after the fact of the customer doing his thing. Please explain.

    Further, I haven’t heard of this type of device hack being done in the EU, where non-signature style pin cards have been in use for a long time. Is there something different in the EU system or in the US mentality? Seriously, I’m asking…not just snark, I promise.

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