A discovery by two Washington University scientists in the mid-1990s could play a role in preventing the kind of credit card fraud that recently affected customers of the suburban St. Louis-based grocery store chain Schnucks.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Marcel Muller and Ron Indeck were attempting to shrink bits of data when they learned that magnetic media has what amounts to a fingerprint.
Tiny signals are present on the magnetic medium that comprises both hard drives and the strips on the back of credit cards. If the unique fingerprint on those strips is compared to fingerprints in a database, fraud can be detected.
"It's a tiny signal, and most credit card readers consider it noise, and they filter it out," said Robert Morley, an associate professor of electrical and systems engineering, who worked with the two scientists. "But we amplify the data, so we can pull that signal out and identify the card."
California-based MagTek has adopted the technology, seeding the market with millions of card readers that can detect the fingerprints.
"The easiest analogy is a human fingerprint," said Mimi Hart, the company's chief executive. "Your fingerprint has a lot of minutiae points on it. But when you put your finger down, depending on how you roll it or the pressure you put on it, the sensor is going to pick up different minutiae points."
Read more in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.