Peter Hermann reports:
Fairfax County police are investigating skimmers that were found attached to two automated teller machines at Fairfax hospitals. The devices, discovered this week, are designed to copy personal bank card information and pass codes for thieves…. The devices were found Tuesday at an ATM near the lobby gift shop of the Inova Fairfax Hospital Cardiac Care Center and on Wednesday at an ATM next to the cafeteria at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital.
Read more on The Washington Post.
As Hermann reports, this is not the first time the ATM at the cardiac care center was tampered with. Another skimmer on the same ATM had been discovered in September.
As NBC reports, the ATMs are not maintained by the hospitals, raising the question of who is responsible for checking on them regularly? It appears that the skimmers were discovered by either hospital security or people walking through, but not by those who might actually be responsible for installing and maintaining them.
Actually, I’m surprised we don’t hear about this kind of thing more often. Other than this report, the September report involving Fairfax, and an April report about ATM skimmers found at 8 GTA hospitals in Toronto, Canada, I don’t recall reading other reports of skimmers attached to an ATM in a hospital. Yet as I’ve walked through a number of hospitals in the past year, I’ve repeatedly thought how easy it would be to do this, and how victims probably would have a tough time figuring out where the breach occurred.