“This was six years ago,” Benny said, “when the economy in Japan was still very big. You had all these Japanese tourists coming to Hong Kong, spending lots and lots of money, and paying for everything with credit cards. These certain people came to me with what is called a ‘skimmer.’ What it is…”
A skimmer, Avery learned, was a battery-operated, wireless device that cost some three to five hundred dollars, and that fit easily into the inside pocket of Benny’s jacket. Whenever Benny swiped a customer’s credit card through this little machine, it read onto its very own computer chip all the data embedded in the card’s magnetic security stripe.
“I’m not just talking name, number, and expiration date,” Benny said, grinning at the simplicity of it all. “What the skimmer
He was still grinning three weeks ago, when Avery went to see him again. Benny Lu lived in a small development house out on Sands Spit, a half-hour drive from the city. Avery told him what he needed. A fake credit card that would enable him to rent a car…
He told Benny he’d be renting a car instead of a boat because over the years he had learned that you shouldn’t trust anyone but your mother, and maybe not even her…
…and a fake driver’s license to back up the name on the phony credit card.
“Piece of cake,” Benny Lu said, grinning.
His basement looked like a computer nerd’s hangout. Benny himself looked a little like Fu Manchu in the silk robe he was wearing, which he told Avery his sister who still lived in Hong Kong had sent him for Christmas.
“She says it’s no different under the Chinese,” he assured Avery, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about Hong Kong
When Benny was skimming credit cards for the Hong Kong gang, he was paid a thousand Hong Kong dollars for every name he delivered, which at the time was the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty U.S. bucks. He would skim three or four cards every day except on his day off, which was Wednesday. This averaged out to something like a thousand bucks a week, not enough to buy his own restaurant but plenty of extra spending money if only the Hong Kong credit card dicks hadn’t busted the gang, and almost busted him in the bargain.
Here in the U.S., Benny paid a hundred bucks for each name skimmed by his people in restaurants and gasoline stations. He got his supply of blank plastic cards from a manufacturer in Germany who mass-produced them and sold them to him (and many other counterfeiters like him) for two hundred bucks a card. Using a thermal dye printer, Benny stamped American Express, Visa, or Master-Card graphics onto the face of a blank card, embossed it with the name and account number of a skimmed card’s true owner, and then embedded the stolen code onto the counterfeit’s pristine magnetic stripe. He sold the clones for two thousand bucks a pop, cheap at twice the price when you considered that whatever you charged on the electronically identical card wouldn’t be discovered until the genuine card’s owner got his bill a month later.
“Sign the name on this sheet of paper a dozen or so times before you sign the back of the card,” Benny told him. “So it’ll have a natural flow to it.”
“Andy Hardy?” Avery said. “That’s the guy’s name?”
“That’s his name, that’s right. That’s the name on the original card.”
“Like in Mickey Rooney?”
“Who’s Mickey Rooney?” Benny asked.
“Don’t they show old movies on television in Hong Kong?”
“Sure, but who’s Mickey Rooney?”
“He was Andy Hardy.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You never heard of Judge Hardy?”
“I try to stay far away from judges,” Benny said.
Avery shrugged, and then signed the name “Andy Hardy” ten times before he signed the back of the card. He was now in possession of a credit card with the name ANDY HARDY embossed on its front in raised letters, and his own “Andy Hardy” signature on the back of it.
“How long will this fly?” he asked Benny.
“Should take you through the end of May at least.”
Which was world enough and time.
Replicating a driver’s license was a simpler and much less expensive matter.
Benny explained that in his line of work a “template” was a layered graphics file that could be computer-manipulated to hide or reveal images and text. In the good old days two or three years ago, when thirty percent of all counterfeit and false identification seized by law enforcement agencies came from the internet, Benny had purchased driver’s-license templates for all fifty states, God bless American enterprise!
