It's Skimmer-Mania in Connecticut today, with every news and media outlet breathlessly reporting another area store in which your financial data may have been skimmed. Do you know what a credit card skimmer device looks like? I do, thanks to LaBonne's Market - Prospect.

Over the past two weeks there have been numerous credit card skimming devices discovered inside various businesses across Connecticut. In the past week, Big Y and Walmart in Naugatuck, Big Y in Cromwell. a Mobil gas station in Fairfield, and LaBonne's Market in Prospect, and their local police departments have posted warnings on their social media accounts to their customers after skimming devices were discovered inside their establishments.

Labonne's Market - Prospect posted a few photos of the suspects on their Facebook account, but the most interesting photo is of the actual skimming device in a side-by-side comparison to the real thing. Here it is again:

Credit - LaBonne's Market
Credit - LaBonne's Market
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The skimming device is the one on the bottom, and it's almost an exact replica of the real terminal. The skimmer is missing the illuminated white circle on the green accept button, and the colors of the action keys are a bit subtle, but wow, at first glance, I would never suspect anything was out of the ordinary.

I don't know what I imagined skimming devices to look like, but I had imagined them to be a tiny enclosure on the debit/credit card slot only? Labonne's Market says that two men installed the device on register 3 at their Prospect store at 1:03PM on Saturday, June 29, 2024. It was discovered by employees the very next day, and appears to be the type of skimmer that needs to be retrieved in order to upload the data. Good looking out LaBonne's, thank you for sharing this photo.

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