Plastic criminals: credit card thieves make a killing in Mexico's finer restaurants.

It used to be that when one thought about organized crime, Al Capone and Manhattan prostitutes came to mind. But today it's a brand new crook roaming the urban landscape. He doesn't run underground gambling halls or have judges in his back pocket. Instead, he talks about skimming and cloning

Credit card fraud has grown to an annual US$50 million business in Mexico, and well-organized, international gangs of thieves are employing waiters in the finest restaurants, bums in the dumpsters and hackers on the Internet to steal personal information and turn it into merchandise and cash.

"These are not street-corner rateros. This is part of a sophisticated organized crime racket," said Liberto Ferrer Anaya, the director of fraud prevention at the Mexican Banking Association.

METHODS OF RIPOFF

Several times this summer, credit card companies and various security organizations held conferences to educate the public about this problem, for which Mexico ranks No. 1 in Latin America.

Although Mexico is notorious for muggings in which credit cards are acquired through force, these strong-arm methods are not the most popular way to get hold of that valuable magnetic strip on the back of a card.

Skimming, in which a criminal swipes the code of an unwitting credit card holder, has become the main problem. This can be done with a handheld device that reads the code instantaneously. Waiters in posh Mexico City restaurants or fashionable Cancun discos are the main culprits, often skimming a patron's card on their way to the register. Security experts display Exhibit A--seized devices that are the size of a pack of cigarettes and can hang on a waiter's belt disguised as a pager.

"A quick swipe at a restaurant or in a disco. Who's going to notice?" said Guillermo Maniaux, the director of security for MasterCard, whose company has 650 million cards in circulation around the globe.

Waiters can skim several cards on a good night and sell them in bulk--at a rate of US$20 to US$30 per card, according to Maniaux--to higher-ups in the credit card fraud chain. In turn, the buyers will download these numbers on a computer and have them ready to charge for goods or services around the globe in a matter of minutes.