Hotel Room Key - the Key to Your Credit Card?

11/09/2007
Security and Protection

If you often get to go on business trips or you are a travelling fan, hotels have, probably, become your second home. If you, during your trips, under some circumstances have to stay alone, your wallet's inhabitants find a new close friend in your hotel room key. And can you imagine that they can get so close, that your personal information from your credit card turns out to be on your room key as well?

Well, of course, it does not happen by magic. Some hotel owners have been spotted to encode their clients' credit card numbers into their hotel room keys. The question of card holders' personal information safety during their hotel stays has been raised on an identity theft seminar in Nevada. The speakers have shown their concern about the fact that hotel visitors' personal data is entered onto their room key.

Imbedding any kind of personal information, whether it is your name, phone number, home address, check-in and out dates, hotel room number, or credit card number and the card's expiration date, is forbidden by law. Once such information appears on your plastic-stylized card with a magnetic strip, you are an easy catch for identity thieves.

One swipe of a card through a credit card reader and your money is in the fraudsters' hands. Just think of all the problems that another hotel stay can bring you.

Though some hotels' chief-executives deny being involved in illegal actions, California detectives have found evidence witnessing that such practices occurred. Now, hotels seem to have abandoned such unlawful practices. But still there are some obscure points in all those incidents.

Professional identity thieves, having found out that they can get an access to a credit card number without making great efforts, just started stealing hotel room keys. What they do with it is they collect your personal information, committing credit fraud, thus. There is no need to explain what it results in.

These hotel plastic card keys can also be easily used at ATMs and at some other places that are deprived of store clerks' surveillance during the transactions.

After all you have read the first thing on your mind will, probably, be "No more hotels!" Do not jump to such radical conclusions. You just need to remember some precaution measures you should stick to, and your credit card number will be safe and sound.

What you should do first as you check out or your room is to claim for your hotel room key. Hotels, as a rule, do not destroy it after you leave. They just put it into one of the front desk drawers and keep it in there. So you can ask to hand it to you and destroy it the way you like on legal grounds.

The second safety rule of your hotel stay will be to never lose sight of your key. Every time you go out of your room or leave a hotel keep it in your pocket or wallet.

And one more thing you should do to protect yourself from credit fraudsters' attacks is to make sure that your hotel does not encode visitors' personal information into room keys. For that, just talk to a hotel manager and clear up all those points.

Following these two simple rules will prevent you from exposing yourself to any kind of credit fraud and will turn your stay into a pleasant, peaceful rest.

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Comments

RonRowland, 09:15 AM, November 11, 2007
Where did you get this info and stuff? Who could guess a hotel room key might be connected to a credit card 'key'? Folks you amaze me

Nancy Brown, 08:03 AM, April 04, 2008
Man, din't you know that?! I used such keys at Hilton hotels. This is really convenient

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