Here’s a new twist on an old scam that may be affecting retailers.
The old scam was to get small business owners to purchase office supplies, copier paper, copier toner, etc. at inflated prices and pay exorbitant shipping costs. The scam was driven by unscrupulous distributors that had sales people do the old hard sell on a merchant’s support personnel who didn’t know any better.
The new scam involves an automated calling system that dials the retailer. The message delivered from this automated system is that the retailer’s credit card terminal is not PCI compliant and that the retailer needs to order new terminals to ensure that they meet legal requirements and remain PCI compliant. The automated system then asks the call’s recipient to press a key to order terminals.
At its best case, this may just be another take on the old office supplies scam and is being run by an unscrupulous credit card terminal dealer to jack up sales. In a worst case scenario, this may be an attempt by some form of organized crime to get doctored terminals into the retail stream so that they can collect credit card data for resale.
Either way, the word needs to get out that retailers are being targeted.
PCI Guru 