According to Bloomberg.com, U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil for the World Cup have been warned: beware the chupacabra.
Card cloning is common in Brazil, so U.S. citizens should take precautions when withdrawing money and check account activity often, the U.S. Citizen Services office in Brazil said on its Twitter account. Thirty percent of Brazilians experienced card fraud in the last five years, according to ACI Worldwide’s Global Consumer Fraud Survey of 6,000 people to be released later this month. That’s the seventh-most of 20 nations.
The world’s most-watched sports event begins in eight days, and Americans are the largest foreign group of World Cup ticket-holders. Whereas Brazilian banks have put clients’ identifying information in so-called smart chips to prevent cloning, many foreign cards don’t possess the technology. Devices used to skim card information are dubbed chupacabras after the mythical creature said to drink the blood of goats.
“Years back, all Brazilian cards migrated to chip-and-pin technology just to tackle this type of fraud, which has been a successful initiative,” Joel Nunes, an ACI solutions consultant in Brazil, said in an e-mail. “As Brazil welcomes visitors using cards with older technology, there is an opportunity for fraudsters to again use sophisticated skimming devices.”
