Ever since she became a victim of identity theft earlier this year, Kateřina Jakubcová, who works at a consulting firm, thinks twice about taking cash out of just any ATM in Prague.

"I didn't realize it was so easy to copy a person's credit card," she said.

Jakubcová learned the hard way in September, when somebody in Thailand withdrew 35,000 Kč ($1,400) from her account using a credit card that had never left her wallet. Jakubcová, 29, said she doesn't know exactly how the information was stolen but suspects she was the victim of what is known as the altered ATM scam.

The scam isn't very complicated. A perpetrator installs a piece of hardware onto the card slot of an ATM. When a bank card — either credit or debit — is inserted into the machine, it copies the information stored on the magnetic strip while a small camera, sometimes placed to the side of a brochure holder, records the PIN as it's typed into the keypad. The thief then has all the information needed to steal money all over the world.

This is just one of myriad tricks used by scammers, who are increasingly finding more sophisticated ways to steal people's identities. Like elsewhere in the world, identity theft is a growing problem here, and more people are turning to "chip cards" for increased security.

Impossible to copy

Chip cards store information on a memory chip instead of a magnetic strip and require a PIN number, even to make a purchase in a store. They are safer because, at least for the time being, it's more difficult to copy information from an encoded memory chip than a magnetic strip.

"It is virtually impossible to copy," said Pavel Hejzlar, a spokesman for ČSOB, which has issued 600,000 such cards.

The number of cards on the market has quadrupled since banks started offering them in 2000. By the first quarter of 2005, banks had issued 2.4 million of them, an increase of nearly 1 million from the end of 2003.

Chip cards comprise approximately one-third of the 7 million bank cards, including both debit and credit, issued to date in the Czech Republic.

They are widely recognized as one of the most effective tools for preventing identity theft. Banks don't publish the number of identity theft cases perpetrated in the Czech Republic each year but theft, specifically via ATM fraud, is definitely on the rise, according to Milan Zátka of the Payment Card Association (SBK).

The SBK doesn't disclose the number of ATM fraud cases but banks contacted by The Prague Post acknowledged that they have encountered several cases of altered ATMs.

Distance theft

Jakubcová thinks she must have unknowingly used one of these ATMs because she never lost her credit card or misplaced her PIN. The perpetrator, who probably bought the information from a source in this country, used the information to withdraw her daily limit — 35,000Kč — in three separate withdrawals on the same day.

Luckily for her, Citibank noticed the transactions and immediately contacted her. She had no idea what to do — except cancel her card — but the bank recommended she file a police report.

"That's not something I would think of doing," she said with a laugh, recalling how she had to explain what a credit card was to the police. "They couldn't understand why stealing a piece of plastic was a big deal."

Filing the report, however, was the best thing Jakubcová could have done. It proved that she was in fact in the Czech Republic, not Southeast Asia, when her card was being used in Bangkok. As a result, she got her money back.

"Whatever happened, the important things is that after two months I got my money back."