![]() The hotel industry continues to deny that there's anything treacherous about the keys. Wallace told ComputerWorld travelers should take their access card with them and shred it when they get home. He said hotel officials expressed surprise when he showed them the results. His curiosity piqued, Wallace said he carries a small card reader with him when he travels.Īt one resort, he said, his card key contained credit card information, his address and his name. ![]() "It's not an urban myth it can potentially happen," she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.įar from being a total debunking, the Computerworld story was sparked by an incident in which Peter Wallace, information technology director for AAA Reading-Berks in Wyomissing, Pa., reported finding personal information on magnetic hotel key cards when visiting three major hotel chains. In fact, at least one major hotel chain concedes it formerly stored credit card information on its keys but says it no longer does so, according to Janet Pope, spokeswoman for the Pasadena Police Department.īut Pope rejected the "urban myth" tag making the rounds about the keys. All of the hotels denied that such information is on their keys, but said guests were free to keep the keys at check-out. "I had no idea this was even a possibility."īrierly said she didn't know which hotel keys had the embedded information, saying she typically leaves the key in the room upon checkout, but won't any more. "Two of the keys brought up a name and partial address, and another one brought up a name, address and credit card number," Brierly said. Five or six people provided their keys, and the speaker swiped them through a credit card reader. The speaker asked for volunteers to provide their credit-card style room keys, the ones with the magnetic stripe. Brierly, a deputy attorney general in the state AG's Bureau of Consumer Protection, attended a High Technology Crime Investigation Association conference in South Lake Tahoe. In Nevada, Deputy Attorney General Tracey Brierly saw some evidence with her own eyes. Seeing Is BelievingĪdding more fuel to the fire, since the rumors regarding hotel keys were first supposedly debunked, instances have shown up around the country of hotel card keys actually containing personal information encoded by the hotel. Snopes itself conceded tbat the report about hotels encoding key cards with personal information was confused with another, much more legitimate story - that of identity thieves stealing key cards and turning them into "clone" credit cards using personal data that had been taken from other sources. The police sleuths now say that hotel executives have assured them that personal information is not included on their key cards.īut it's not necessarily the end of the story. One of the detectives said that during an investigaton, he came across a plastic hotel card key from a major hotel that had personal information - name, length of stay and credit card number - that could lead to identify theft and fraud. The great hotel key mystery began on October 6, 2003, when Detective Sergeant Kathryn Jorge of the Pasadena, California, Police Department received information from a group of Southern California detectives who had formed a fraud investigations network. The magazine conceded that its sample was small and confined to the U.S., however. ![]() in Carson, who did the tests, the Los Angeles Times reported. The cards yielded only strings of numbers and letters, according to Terry Benson, engineering group leader for MagTek Inc. The keys had been collected by staff members in their travels. In a slightly more authoritative debunking, Computerworld, an information technology trade journal challenged a top maker of magnetic card readers to find personal data on 100 room-card keys - from Hilton, Holiday Inn, Sheraton, Westin and other major chains. "The cards simply contain a flag indicating that the guest has a credit card on file with the resort and is authorized to charge purchases to his room," explained Snopes. "Even in cases where a hotel keycard can be used to purchase goods and services (e.g., at a resort complex such as Walt Disney World), guests' credit card information is not encoded on the cards themselves," said with its customary assurance. The reports were debunked at the time by self-proclaimed mythbuster, which claimed that hotels didn't encode anything more than the guest's name and duration of their stay on the card. A few years ago, a rumor made the rounds on e-mail and the Web that hotels were encoding room key cards with guests' personal information, and that any prospective identity thief with a card reader could gain access to your most essential private data.
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