GAINESVILLE, Fla.—Much of the fraud involving counterfeit credit, ATM debit and retail gift cards relies on the ability of thieves to use cheap, widely available hardware to encode stolen data onto any card's magnetic stripe.
But new research suggests retailers and ATM operators could reliably detect counterfeit cards using a simple technology that flags cards which appear to have been altered by such tools, Krebs on Security reported.
Researchers at the University of Florida found that account data encoded on legitimate cards is invariably written using quality-controlled, automated facilities that tend to imprint the information in uniform, consistent patterns. Cloned cards, however, usually are created by hand with inexpensive encoding machines, and as a result feature far more variance or "jitter" in the placement of digital bits on the card's stripe, Krebs on Security explained.
A team of five University of Florida researchers partnered with Walmart to test their technology that can be easily and cheaply incorporated into point-of-sale systems at retail store cash registers. They said the Walmart trial demonstrated that researchers’ technology distinguished legitimate gift cards from clones with up to 99.3% accuracy, Krebs said.