Tracking Down Credit Card Dumps I have been examining numerous computers and media cards to support fraud investigations in the past year. One group of thieves has been installing skimmers (devices that record magnetic stripe data) in the magnetic stripe readers on doors of certain banking institutions that limit access to their ATMs after hours. Then the thieves install micro video cameras in the light fixtures of the ATMs to capture the users pin codes. The thieves later match the recorded pin code to the skimmed account number at the door, encode new cards, and pillage bank accounts by getting cash at another ATM location. It is not difficult to find the ATM videos on the media cards from the cameras or on the computer hard drives. The credit card/ATM card numbers can be bit tougher, however. Searching for 16 digit numbers in a Windows computer will yield a huge volume of false hits. And, if the operation has been running for a while, many of the a...