Hotels Lead the Industry In Credit Card Theft

katarn writes "A study released this year found that, of the credit card hacking cases last year, 38 percent involved the hotel industry. At hotels with inadequate data security, the greatest amount of credit card information can be obtained using the simplest methods. It doesn't require brilliance on the part of the hacker. Most of the chronic security breaches in the hotel industry are the result of a failure to equip, or to store or transmit this kind of data properly, and that starts with the point-of-sale credit card swiping systems."

Comments

Re:they can also clone your card to a room key as

[Anonymous Coward]

Most room keys do not offer a mag-stripe that is capable of holding all 3 tracks of CC data properly...

...and outright fraud

[Just Some Guy]

I recently stayed at a cheap chain motel while traveling for a softball tournament. They had a sign posted (in the disused lavoratory, etc.) along the lines of:

Theft is a problem. We have a safe in your room. If you use it and someone steals your stuff, we'll insure you up to $10,000. For your convenience, a $1.50 charge will be added to your bill for the rental of the safe. If you don't want to pay the charge, let us know and we'll remove it.

(Part in bold is as verbatim as my memory allows.)

When I checked out the next morning, I asked the clerk to remove the $1.50 fee. She kind of huffed, spent the next 5 minutes messing around with the computer, then gave me a receipt for the correct amount that I expected to pay. Two days later, I noticed that my online statement was off $1.50+tax. Sure enough, they'd charged me anyway. When I called them to say that I wanted it fixed - yes, I am that stubborn and nitpicky - they assured me that this never happens and they were so sorry.

As cheap as the motel was, that was an extra 3% or so in automatic free revenue. If they're operating at a 10% profit margin, that's about a 66% increase in actual profit. How many times to people look that closely at their credit card bills? I'd be willing to bet that 99 times out of 100, people see that the charge was correct to the nearest $10 and don't check it to the penny, or they figure it's not worthwhile and don't follow up on it.

Re:People with too much time on their hands

[NoPantsJim]

I used to be one of these night shift people. I was definitely underpaid, but I used my spare time on the job with a laptop and a book learning to program.

Here's the scary thing, plenty of people made it extra, extra easy for an employee to steal. We had this ridiculous backup process that had to be run nightly which would make our computers inoperable for about 90 minutes. If someone with a reservation came to check in I could do so, but any walk-ins would have to wait. Around 2-3 times a month people would come in so exhausted from driving all day that they'd just hand me their credit card and say "I'll pick it up in the morning, just give me a room key". I think that since it was an upscale Marriott people just assumed everything was safe.