and thought it was a terrific price. The cars moved briskly.
In subsequent weeks, a spate of fraudulent credit card transactions were confounding law enforcement agents and credit card companies. They were on all sorts of cards and dispersed around the country in almost haphazard fashion. The authorities looked in vain for some sort of pattern, some fragile thread that might connect them. One finally emerged. It turned out that every card that had been used in the fraudulent purchases had also been used legitimately by the cardholder at the new Rent-A-Wreck at the Miami airport.
A little more investigation broke the case open. It seems that the young men weren't really interested in making a living renting cars at extraordinarily low prices. That was simply their cover. Their true business was recording the credit card numbers of everyone who came through and selling them to a ring of credit card thieves. The thieves then used them to make the illegal transactions.
In the world of fraud, it helps to remember that things are never what they seem. In fact, they are often the opposite of what they seem. I'm reminded of that little demonstration in the David Mamet con artist movie, "House of Games." Two men, one a soldier, are waiting at a Western Union office for money that's supposed to be wired to them. They don't know each other. The other man tells the soldier he sure hopes his money comes, and the soldier says the same thing. You know, the man says, if my money comes in first, I'll give you some of it, because I know you'll pay it back and I know you'd do the same for me. The soldier is warmed by this generosity. But of course no money is being wired to the man. He's the scam artist. When the soldier's money comes, he offers to give some to the other man and he'll never see it again. At the Miami Airport, people thought they were renting a car and they were actually donating their credit cards to thieves. It could be happening anytime you use your credit card, if you don't know who you're dealing with.
CUT THE CARDS
We all understand "sticker shock," that numb feeling you get when you go shopping for a new car. Well, now there's "statement shock." That's when your credit card has not left your wallet for weeks but you receive your monthly bill and it looks like you spent the entire month shopping on Rodeo Drive. Most likely, you're a victim of counterfeiters helping themselves to your credit. As I pointed out earlier in the chapter on checks, check fraud far outstrips credit card fraud. But plastic fraud is an accelerating problem, too, and new card tricks keep getting devised to enable crooks to enrich themselves.
Federal law generally limits a cardholder's liability for use of a stolen credit card to just fifty dollars. If you report the stolen card promptly, the issuer will typically waive that fifty dollars as well, as a goodwill gesture. So it's not the consumer who is hurt by card theft, but the issuers. All fraud losses, though, get reflected in higher prices, so, one way or another, the money ultimately comes out of everyone's pocket.
In the 1990s, it became commonplace for forgers to start altering existing credit cards. The simplest thing criminals do is to tell garbage collectors that for every intact card they find in the garbage and turn over to them, they'll pay them thirty-five dollars. Even though credit card companies repeatedly admonish cardholders to cut up their old cards before discarding them, I'm amazed that most people don't. They assume that because the card's expired, it's worthless, so just toss it in the trash.
Once they've got the cards, the thieves can't go out and use them, because verification machines will reject them as expired. So they need to make a few appropriate modifications. They take a handkerchief and lay it over a card. Then they put a hot iron over the handkerchief. The heat and weight of the iron melts the embossing. In other words, it flattens the raised letters and digits that constitute the name, account number, and expiration date. Putting the card in boiling water will accomplish the same thing. With a card embosser, which is easily and inexpensively obtained from an office supply store, they put on a new, illegally-obtained name, number, and expiration date.
Finally, they turn the card over, and with a paper clip, put a scratch in