Altered Card

An altered card is a payment card that has in some way been physically changed to be used for fraudulent purposes. This generally means changing the card to show new cardholder information, such as numbers or expiration dates.

Card alteration fraud is as old as credit cards themselves, and at first involved embossing real credit card numbers on bogus plastic blanks. The fraudster might also try to doctor one or two of the numbers on a real card in hopes it would fool a card imprinter.

The invention of POS systems with magnetic stripe readers made altering cards more difficult, and embedding microprocessors (chips) into cards increased the difficulty. Altered cards are still around, but nowadays they’re more likely to look and feel like the real thing, complete with logos, images, graphics, and real magnetic strips. The rise of eCommerce (and eCommerce fraud) has made altered physical cards less of a problem.

See also Counterfeit Card