Before you swipe your card at the store, police want you to take a good look at the machine first. A thin plastic shell, snapped right over a real checkout terminal, can copy your card number and PIN while you stand there paying for milk. It fits so well that most people never notice a thing.
The U.S. Secret Service spent all of 2025 hunting these devices with local police, and the numbers show how big the problem got. Working with federal, state and local partners, the agency visited more than 9,000 businesses, pulled 411 illegal skimming devices off machines, and stopped an estimated potential loss of more than $428.1 million. Agents inspected nearly 60,000 point-of-sale terminals, gas pumps and ATMs along the way, according to the Secret Service.
The FBI estimates skimming drains more than $1 billion a year from U.S. financial institutions and consumers. And the crooks move fast. Secret Service surveillance video from a 2026 Los Angeles sweep showed a suspect installing one of these devices in under two seconds.
The device is built to look exactly like the real thing
There are two versions of this trick, and one is much harder to catch than the other. A skimmer is a fake overlay that sits on top of the machine and looks almost identical to the front of an ATM or store terminal, said Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Kalee Barnhart. A shimmer is thinner and slides inside the card slot itself.
The difference is where they steal from. Skimmers copy the magnetic strip on the back of your card. Shimmers read the chip on the front. Both take only seconds to put in and pull out, Barnhart told the newspaper covering her department, and once thieves have your data they grab it over Bluetooth, off an SD card, or by simply removing the device and downloading everything on it.
Because it copies a real card so cleanly, the fake data can then be re-encoded onto a blank card with a magnetic strip and used to buy things or pull cash. The same stolen numbers also get sold to other criminals online.
Self-checkouts and gas pumps are the favorite spots
Anywhere you deal with a machine instead of a person is fair game. South Burlington, Vermont Deputy Police Chief Sean Briscoe put it plainly. “So it’s normally gas pumps, ATMs, something that you’re having an interaction with a machine rather than a person,” he said.
Self-checkout lanes are a favorite because no clerk is standing there watching. Barnhart said thieves pick “the easiest locations for them,” meaning spots out of camera range or in poor light. That is also why she tells people to use ATMs inside a bank when they can, and why local police say the crime can pop up anywhere.
These are not one-off cases either. In 2022, two men placed skimmers at self-checkouts in Sam’s Club locations across Washington, Allegheny and Butler counties in Pennsylvania. The amount of money stolen was never specified, but the pattern is the same one police keep finding today.
People on food benefits are getting hit the hardest
The people losing the most are often the ones who can least afford it. Most EBT cards, used for government food assistance, still run on old magnetic-stripe technology that is easy to copy. That is starting to change: as of August 2026 seven states have issued chip-enabled EBT cards and six more are mid-rollout. Criminals time their fake withdrawals right around the monthly deposit, so the money is gone before a family ever gets to spend it.
Michael Peck, an assistant special agent in charge in the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division, laid out the math. At $300 to $1,200 a month per recipient, he said, the $428.1 million in potential losses works out to benefits for hundreds of thousands of people. The Secret Service estimates a single skimming device can generate up to $1 million in stolen funds.
The damage is worst where small stores sit packed close together. In late June 2026, the Secret Service’s New York Field Office ran a three-day sweep across the city, visiting 1,010 businesses and running nearly 4,000 inspections. Agents pulled 35 skimming devices, 15 in Brooklyn, 10 in Queens, nine in the Bronx and one in Manhattan, and prevented $36.5 million in potential losses. Matt McCool, the special agent in charge there, called the city “a target-rich environment for illegal skimmers” and said in the report on the sweep that stealing card and EBT information “from hardworking New Yorkers is not a victimless crime.”
The checks are still going on in 2026
The sweeps did not stop when the calendar flipped. In late January 2026, agents ran a four-city operation in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Seattle and Denver. Denver alone gave up 19 devices across 362 businesses, blocking about $20 million in potential losses. Seattle turned up 14 more. Cincinnati came back clean, which does happen.
Plenty of owners have no idea anything is wrong. Peck said managers who swear their machines are fine are often surprised. “It has happened multiple times when a manager tells us they have checked their store. We ask if we can check. They give us the go-ahead, and we spot a skimmer right away,” he said in a Secret Service release.
Even a fresh cleanup does not scare the thieves off. Secret Service Financial Analyst Vincent Porter said that after agents taught store owners what to look for, scammers came back within days, or even hours, and installed new devices. The one bright spot, Porter said, was that the owners then knew what to look for and caught them right away.
One Houston shopper found hers by accident
Sometimes it is a regular shopper, not a cop, who catches one. Savannah Dansby was paying with her EBT card at a Pyburn’s grocery store on Fondren Road in southwest Houston on the busy Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend when the machine grabbed her card.
“When I went to go swipe my food stamp card, something snugged my food stamp card,” Dansby said. “That’s when I found out it was a skimmer.” She pulled on the piece and the whole thing came off in her hand. “It wasn’t really that hard. I kind of pulled down and then it popped off,” she told a Houston TV station. She alerted employees, posted photos on Nextdoor, and called police the next day. The week before, the Secret Service had announced it found more than a dozen skimmers across the Houston area during a large operation.
Give the machine a gentle tug before you pay
You cannot be totally sure any reader is clean, but a few seconds of looking helps a lot. Before you pay, scan the card slot and keypad for anything loose, crooked, damaged or scratched. Bulky keypads and stickers stuck in odd spots are red flags too. Exposed cables near a freestanding ATM are another warning sign worth checking.
Then give it a gentle tug. Barnhart suggests pulling lightly on the reader, with the emphasis on lightly, to feel whether it is loose, and calling local police if it moves. Vermont police put it in plainer terms: before you stick your card in, reach up and give it a shake, and if it shakes, something is going on. A skimmer is often just a plastic shell snapped over the real machine, so anything that wiggles is worth walking away from.
The best defense is paying without a swipe
The trick only works when your card physically touches the machine, so the strongest move is to not swipe at all. Tapping your card, or using a phone wallet, keeps your real number out of the slot entirely. Barnhart is blunt about it. “They’ve not figured out how to steal information using Apple Pay or Google Pay,” she said, and tap-to-pay on a physical card adds a layer of protection too.
If you have to enter a PIN, cover the keypad with your free hand. Thieves often pair a skimmer with a tiny pinhole camera aimed at the pad to record your code. When you use a standard bank debit card, running it as credit skips the PIN altogether, though the stripe is still read, so tapping or inserting the chip is the better defense. Credit cards also carry stronger protections. Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark said a credit card lets you start what is called a chargeback, “so that you get your money back,” and it makes you less likely to be scammed in the first place.
The last habit costs nothing and catches almost everything. Read your statements. Set text or email alerts so any charge you did not make gets flagged fast, and call your bank the moment something looks off. As Barnhart put it, “Keep track of your statements to make sure your purchases are yours.” The theft can feel personal long after the money is gone. “It feels like a violation of your privacy when your information is stolen,” she said.
