Just a note of warning to all fellow reader's who will be travelling to Thailand.
The high tech thief you wont even see! The next type you go to the ATM, pop in your credit card or bank card to draw cash, being always careful not to let anyone see your PIN number.
When you get home from your holiday you find that your bank account has been ransacked in the Republic of Ripoff, or somewhere equally far away. This can happen to you if you had been accessing your personal account and there's no way to get your money back. This happened to my wife whilst in Phuket last month!
She was SKIMMED. It works like this - the thieves attach a device called a skimmer over the card slot. When you push your card through it, the skimmer records the details from the magnetic strip. They also attach a keypad over the top of the existing one to record your PIN number. They now have everything they need to make a replica of your card and use it!!!
Skimmers are sophisticated devices and match the look and colours of the ATM machine precisely. If you didn't know about them you'd never guess. Now you know. If the keypad is not flush with the rest of the machine, and if the card slot sticks out from the machine, find another machine. And dont forget to change your PIN frequently.
You dont want to have to go through what we went through when we got back and found our account emptied! And as far as the banks are concerned the only answer you will get back is "We are not liable!". Although we could prove that we were in Singapore and not France when the withdrawals we done and that we had the original card with us. Arquing that we could not possibly be both in Singapore and France within a period of one hour when one of the wthdrawals was done. The bank would not even sympathise with the customer. In this case, the bank being DBS (Dont Be Skimmed).
