At about 9 a.m. Thursday, Gainesville Police detectives and state inspectors met at a West Newberry Road parking lot to launch Operation Clean Sweep.
“Our hope is to not find anything,” GPD spokesperson Officer Ben Tobias told detectives, “but if we do, we’ll be ready.”
GPD and inspectors from the Florida Department of Agriculture Division of Consumer Services teamed up to search nearly every gas station in Gainesville for a skimmer, a device which can be used to steal credit-card information from customers who pay by card at the pump.
After about five hours of searching through about 30 gas stations and hundreds of pumps in Gainesville, they found what they were looking for: a skimmer.
GPD found the device at a Texaco station, located at 1602 NE Waldo Road, and are still searching for a suspect, Tobias said.
Tobias said Florida is one of three states in the continental U.S. where credit-card fraud is most common. This is the main reason police are taking a more active approach to finding skimmers in the state, Tobias said.
Thursday’s skimmer was the fourth one GPD has pulled in the month of May alone.
For GPD Detective Matt Goeckel, large-scale skimmer searches such as Operation Clean Sweep are about getting in front of the issue.
Goeckel said officers first began seeing skimmers between 2010 and 2011 and suspect the devices are only getting more sophisticated. Because suspects can install skimmers into pumps so easily, sometimes as quickly as 10 minutes, Goeckel said police must be especially alert.
“It takes no time at all,” he said. “It just looks like they’re getting gas.”
Charles Davidson, an inspector with FDADCS, said it’s nearly impossible to estimate the number of skimmers he’s found inside gas pumps across the state. He’s found too many to count, he said.
“It’s not uncommon, but it’s not everyday — thank goodness,” Davidson said. “They are out there.”
When Rich Reed pulled into the Marathon gas station on Northwest 43rd Street to fill up the tank on his blue pickup truck Thursday afternoon, he reached into his pocket not for a credit or debit card, but for his cellphone.
“If I don’t use Samsung Pay, I use cash,” the 33-year-old Alachua County resident said. “I don’t even carry a debit card anymore.”
Reed said he remembers when he first saw a skimmer device. About a year ago he said he was getting ready to pump gas at a station down in Volusia County, Florida, when a woman noticed the credit-card reader on her gas pump was loose.
Luckily for her, Reed said, the police came and found the foot-long skimming wire before it could steal her card information. But ever since then, he said he stopped taking any chances.
“It’s not safe to go to the pumps anymore,” he said. “Hell, it’s not even safe to go to regular ATMs, just about. They’re everywhere now.”
Contact David Hoffman at dhoffman@alligator.org and follow him on Twitter: @hoffdavid123.
Credit-card skimmer in 2017 at a Texaco gas pump on NE Waldo Rd, as part of "Operation Clean Sweep"
