Courtesy of COMUSNAVEUR Security Staff, via my sources I received the following warning:
You are advised that hotel room keys that look like a credit card will contain personal information, including:
- Customers (your) name
- Customers partial home address
- Hotel room number
- Check in date and check out date
- Customers (your) credit card number and expiration date.
- In Europe, passport numbers are also frequently recorded onto the cards.
When you turn them in to the front desk your personal information is there for any employee to access by simply scanning the card in the hotel scanner. An employee can take a handfull of cards home and using a readily available scanning device, access the information onto a laptop computer and go shopping at your expense. Simply put, hotels do not erase these cards until an employee issues the card to the next hotel guest. It is usually kept in a drawer at the front desk with YOUR INFORMATION ON IT!
You should always destroy the card. NEVER leave it behind in the room and NEVER turn them in to the front desk when you check out of a room. The hotel will not charge you for the card.
Or this could be just a rumour or urban legend:
Hotel Room Keys Have Your Personal Information on Them Including Credit Card Numbers-Fiction
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/k/keycards.htm
Hotel Key Cards – Response from City of Pasadena
Received on 10/23/03 in response to queries at City of Pasadena Website: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_hotel_keycards2.htm
I shall pass the info to my source…
It IS an urban legend, once possibly true but no longer so… my boss sent me this and I checked http://www.snopes.com.
Of course, I imagine it’s not impossible to encode that information on them and not tell anyone they did so, but that’s a, um, paranoid thought. 😉
Being a geek – I have just tested my last hotel card with a magstripe scanner I had lying around and no plain information was visible.