A new solution to detect phony cards

A new technology is being tested to battle counterfeit cards at the point of sale–it detects fake cards by how they are encoded.

Analysts say that the solution may have some promising benefits, but only time will tell if it is adopted by retailers.

Much of the fraud involving counterfeit credit, ATM debit and retail gift cards relies on the ability of thieves to use cheap, widely available hardware to encode stolen data onto any card’s magnetic stripe. But new research suggests retailers and ATM operators could reliably detect counterfeit cards using a simple technology that flags cards that appear to have been altered by such tools, Krebs on Security reported.

Researchers at the University of Florida found that account data encoded on legitimate cards is invariably written using quality-controlled, automated facilities that tend to imprint the information in uniform, consistent patterns. Cloned cards, however, usually are created by hand with inexpensive encoding machines, and as a result feature far more variance or “jitter” in the placement of digital bits on the card’s stripe, Krebs on Security explained.

 

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