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card keys


Trab

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I recently received this information from a cop, who was a friend before joining up. I cannot attest to its truth or usefulness.

Bart

Hotel/Motel Magnetic Key Cards

Ever wonder what is on your magnetic key card?

Answer:

a. Customer's name

b. Customer's partial home address

c. Hotel room number

d. Check-in date and out dates

e. Customer's credit card number and expiration date!

When you turn them in to the front desk your personal

information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner.

An employee can take a hand full of cards home and

using a scanning device, access the information onto a laptop

computer and go shopping at your expense.

Simply put, hotels do not erase the information on these

cards until an employee re-issues the card to the next hotel guest.

At that time, the new guest's information is electronically "overwritten" on the card and the previous guest's information is erased in the overwriting process.

But until the card is rewritten for the next guest, it usually

is kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!

The bottom line is:

Keep the cards, take them home with you, or destroy them.

NEVER leave them behind in the room or room wastebasket, and NEVER turn them in to the front desk when you check out of a room. They will not charge you for the card (it's illegal) and you'll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader.

For the same reason, if you arrive at the airport and discover you

still have the card key in your pocket, do not toss it in an airport

trash basket. Take it home and destroy it by cutting it up,

especially through the electronic information strip!

Information courtesy of: Pasadena Police Department

I personally have a small magnet and pass it across the

magnetic strip several times.

Then try it in the door, it will not work. It

erases everything on the card.

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Trab:

This has the feel and taste of an urban legend to me. I don't see any reason a hotel would program all that information onto a key card. What would be the point? They already have the info in their computer where it's needed. They'd never have the need to recover that info from a card. It seems to be something there would be no rational reason to do, and would also seem to put the hotel into a position where they could at the very least share liability if someone used one of their cards fraudulently.

Thinking this, I asked a friend of mine who works for a major hotel chain if indeed they coded all that info into their cards. He told me absolutely not. And he said he never heard of any other chain doing it either.

I think your idea of running a magnet over the card is fine. I personally don't carry a magent with me, and if I did, I'd worry it might accidently invalidate all my other credit cards.

I wonder if anyone else here knows anything about this.

Cole

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Thanks Cole. I didn't know anyone in the industry. That's useful information. BTW, I wasn't the one doing the magnet thing, it was the writer of the story. I try to avoid carrying a magnet, although I really like them and have several dozen, for fun. If you have the wrong side of a magnet facing you on a long term basis, it can cause 'abnormal' growth. Not necessarily cancer, but strange things.

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I recently received this information from a cop, who was a friend before joining up. I cannot attest to its truth or usefulness.

Bart

http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/hotelkey.asp

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I recently received this information from a cop, who was a friend before joining up. I cannot attest to its truth or usefulness.

Hey. I hedged around and placed adequate cautions in there. Also, please note that this was a friend before joining up, not since. I don't know why he e-mails me this crap, but maybe that's his way of giving me a message.

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Hey. I hedged around and placed adequate cautions in there. Also, please note that this was a friend before joining up, not since. I don't know why he e-mails me this crap, but maybe that's his way of giving me a message.

He means well. My mother does the same thing and I get really mad at her. "Forward this to 10 people" is something that my spam filter automatically deletes without any further input from me.

Just send him the URL and a mini-lecture on these types of things.

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Trab:

I absolutely wasn't getting on your case about this. You have nothing to apologize for. You were trying to help! We need more people like you. And it did sound plausible, till I started to ask myself, why in the world would they do that?

I must get ten cautionary pseudo-info-craps a day with this kind of shit in them, and so I am automatically suspicious. That's the only reason I responded like I did.

Thanks for passing on what seemed a good warning to us, Trab.

Cole

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