Now we also know that as long as we make sure our credit cards are safely tucked in our wallets that there is no chance we can be defrauded. With the advent of electronic processing, carbon papers between slips have disappeared and can no longer be purloined for devious objectives.

But of course the human mind is never foiled for long and criminals have come up with yet another trick to steal our hard-earned cash.

On Wednesday, 25 March five people, four of them waitresses at Spur restaurant at Cape Town International Airport, have been arrested following a tipoff from Absa's fraud unit about credit card skimming.

State of the art

Police found a 'state of the art' skimming device on one of the women. They had been able to link it to fraudulent withdrawals from four patrons' accounts totalling about R40 000. It was, however, likely that more people would come forward when they realised they had been fleeced, a police spokesperson said.

Those arrests were followed by that of a fifth person, a waiter at an upmarket Sea Point restaurant, over the weekend. Police warned people never to let their credit cards out of their sight and to be 'extra cautious' about who they handed them to.

The police said the skimming device — possession of which is illegal — confiscated from the waitresses could hold the details of up to 500 cards and that these devices could be used to not only read cards, but clone them as well.

A while ago The Sandton Chronicle published a story about a young waitress/criminal from Bulgaria.

Swiping cards on the way to the till

She also had in her possession the ingenious skimming device that could record her victims' credit card details electronically by simply swiping their cards on the way to the till. An accomplice would then collect the gadget and forward it to his cronies overseas. Fake cards were then made and hey presto — money for nothing!

This very thing happened to a friend of mine. His wife recently went to the US and he was due to follow. He wanted to deposit some money into his credit card before leaving and dialled up his account on the internet. It was then that he saw four transactions for R1000 — in Rome of all places.

He immediately called his wife who told him that she had not used the card at all and that she had not sneaked off to Rome with a swarthy Italian! The bank, of course, has no choice but to refund him because there is no way his signature could have been on that card. It is the store vendors that lose out in a case like this because the bank simply reverses the funds out of the merchants’ account.

There are two victims here: the person who had his card copied and the merchant who loses those goods to the thieves.

So what can we learn from this?

Be vigilant and always check your credit card statements

Always check your credit card statements, especially if you travel a lot. You could be funding someone’s designer clothes habit. The sooner you report the crime, the more likely the criminal will be caught. As soon as you report a fraudulent activity the card is blacklisted and if the shop assistants keep their cool when presented with it, they can call the police and get the crook arrested.

So be vigilant; the convenience of all our new electronic facilities has opened some interesting avenues for crooks. And girls, maybe now your husband will believe you when you say you have no idea where that R500 cosmetics charge came from.

Have you been a victim of credit card skimming? Do you keep an eye on your card at all times when paying at a restaurant? Leave a comment below...

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