‘I was surprised’: Card skimmer discovered at Fort Pierce gas station prompts investigation
A man found a card skimmer device at a 7-Eleven gas pump, leading to a police investigation and warnings about how to spot these devices
FORT PIERCE, Fla. —
A Treasure Coast man discovered a card skimmer device at a 7-Eleven gas pump on Orange Avenue Monday morning, prompting an investigation by local police. Arlo Bess, who has a background in cybersecurity, said he normally checks for card skimmers before using gas pumps. “So, I pulled the card reader out and it took a little bit of pull, a couple pounds of pull because it was just stuck in there. It wasn’t much at all, and when I got it, I was at first very surprised,” Bess said.
“I’m just naturally paranoid, if you would, from all my work and training,” Bess said. After finding the device, he locked his truck and informed the store manager. “She was equally surprised and said she had never seen one before,” he added.
A card skimmer is a device that criminals attach to legitimate card readers to steal card information, including PINs. “On the inside of that skimmer, it’s got a little microchip in there, and typically they’ll have like a Bluetooth connectivity piece in there. When you slide your card in there, it actually reads the mag stripe off the card and it will intercept that information,” Bess said.
Bess noted that no other gas pumps at the station had card skimmers, but he filed a police report to alert authorities.
Fort Pierce Police Major Michael Santiago said the department is investigating the incident, saying there hasn’t been an incident like this in a while. “We try to track it back to whoever may own that particular skimmer. We also check our systems to see if there’s something going on in the neighboring jurisdictions, if they’ve had similar incidents,” Santiago said. “We conducted intense screening of video surveillance from the actual location to try and identify who may have installed this particular device. I can tell you it’s a little difficult because we simply don’t know when it was installed.”
Santiago and Bess also warned that card skimmers can be found on ATM machines, where criminals may use pinhole cameras to capture PINs. “Typically, if it’s an ATM machine, you’ve got a debit card, and you have a PIN that you have to put in. So, they’ll also have these little pin cameras that will take a picture and watch you actually putting your PIN into the ATM machine,” Bess said.
To identify card skimmers, Santiago recommended checking for tamper-evident seals, such as red or orange tape, on gas pumps. “If that seal is broken, don’t use the system and alert the tenant,” he said.
Bess added that visual inspection can sometimes help. “Visually, you cannot tell. The other card readers, if you look at them on the gas pump, the original ones and even the original one on that one, they’ll be slightly dirty, slightly dinged up a little bit,” he said.
Santiago advised paying for gas inside the store or using tap-to-pay at the pump to avoid potential skimmers. If investigators find the person responsible, that individual will face charges of fraud, attempting to and extract information from individuals’ credit card information. “Depending on what we find, if we can connect how much money was actually stolen from this particular skimmer, there’s always some charges that we can address when it comes to that point,” Santiago said.
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