The Greatest Risk for Credit Card Theft

More thefts occur at restaurants than anywhere else…

According to Visa, 40 percent of all credit card thefts happen at restaurants. Most people probably assume this occurs when a waiter or waitress steals their credit card information during payment. But this isn’t the case. It’s a bit more high-tech– with a growing number of computer hackers choosing to break into restaurant computer databases to download personal information stored on their hard drives.

No one can explain why restaurants are targeted more often, but once a business is viewed as vulnerable, thieves exploit the weakness across the entire market. The restaurant industry responded with astonishment to see such a high percent of thefts occurring in their industry. “I don’t think that there is any greater problem in our industry than anywhere else,” said Todd Mann, Senior Vice President of Business Development for the National Restaurant Association, which represents 935,000 food outlets nationally. Mann said that every day 192 million people eat at a restaurant in America and that because of that volume he could see why there might be more cases of theft from restaurants.

In an effort to protect its customers, Visa is now cracking down on merchants and restaurants that store credit card data improperly. When merchants go against credit card company policies and store the verification codes from credit card transactions, thieves who gain access to the system can create a copy of the credit card and then use it at stores. Visa is focusing their attention on some of the nation’s largest restaurant chains and planning to charge large fines of up to $10,000 a month to those who are improperly storing customer data.

Merchants were charged $4.6 million by Visa in fines across all merchant sectors in 2006, up from $3.4 million in 2005. Jennifer Fischer, Director in Visa’s Payment Systems Risk and Compliance Department said that Visa was trying to work proactively with merchants, getting them to update software so crucial personal information was not stored on their systems. She said the fines were a last resort.