Fast food employee highlights credit card risk

Last week, police busted a woman working at a Wendy's restaurant for credit card fraud.

They say that when customers in the drive through used a credit card to pay for their food, she would swipe their cards through a credit card reader that captures all the card's information. She would take the tiny reader home and download all the data to a laptop computer for her own use. Police say she was making fake credit cards with customers' real data and going shopping with those cards, victimizing between 40 and 50 Wendy's customers.

This is a risk any time we hand our credit cards to someone and can't see what's happening to it. The credit card readers (often called skimmers) are inexpensive, sometimes as cheap as $100. They can fit nicely into someone's pocket, so whenever a server at a restaurant walks away with your card, you may be at risk.