September 10, 2006
-
Hotel keycard info theft myth
For the past few years, I’ve believed the myth that hotels store your name and credit card info on your electronic keycards. I’d heard that to be safe, you should keep those keycards after checking out (you never get charged for them, after all), and destroy them later. Because if a thief got a hold of it, he’d have your credit card info. And ID theft is a big deal these days.
Well, it turns out this belief is false. Leave it to snopes.com:
Anyway, I never did the keycard-destroying thing because it takes extra work, and it feels like a waste of plastic that would go into landfills. I figured that hotels would have their own security systems in place to erase the keycards immediately. And I’m not afraid of credit-card theft because I subscribe to a credit-card monitoring service through Equifax. Ironically enough, I got the free lifetime Equifax subscription because Fidelity lost a laptop containing my 401k data, along with that of thousands of other former Compaq employees. I guess when it comes to identity theft, as in many areas of life, you can’t expect the unexpected.
Comments (3)
Did even think of that! Man, now the wheels are turning…
BTW, thanks for the call! Actually spent the day watching sports…. yeah, I know, anything to stay away from doing the dissertatioN! [Was very good. BC won. Rutgers won. Roddick won (until today...Federer, totally awesome!). Sharipova won. mmm, good.]
Is the credit card monitoring service worth it? I wonder if the lost laptop was a Compaq…
Thanks for the help with getting the word out on the conference.
It’s always hard to measure the value of insurance, which covers a high-cost, low-probability event. Before I got the free service, I subscribed to a lower-grade $5/month service.