Chefs and restaurant owners want to know how to prevent customers' identity theft, so the speaker at the August 2007 meeting of the Myrtle Beach chapter of the American Culinary Federation was Jay Shavitz of Infinity Computer Systems. He explained how credit card information theft can occur at restaurants.

Its called credit card skimming, he said, and some restaurant servers are recruited by crime rings. The bad guys give the servers pocket-size skimmers. When the server gets a credit card and takes it to swipe in the restaurants credit card terminal, he also gives the card a quick swipe through the skimmer. The skimmer gets the cards information off its magnetic strip and stores it.

The skimmers can hold information from 200 to 300 credit cards, Jay said, and then they download the info on their computers at home and send it out of the country.

Restaurants account for about 90 percent of all credit card skimming, he said, because a restaurant is just about the only environment where upon payment the credit cards are removed from customers views.

Jay then explained how the hand-held system his company sells can be used to take orders tableside (servers can even write on the mini-computers screen), and it doubles as a portable credit card terminal. That way the credit card is never out of the customers view. The units batteries are good for about nine hours, so one unit can get through three shifts on two batteries. Its also possible to have a belt-size printer so customer receipts can be printed on the spot.

Becky Billingsley is a professional writer who publishes daily news about Myrtle Beach area restaurants at http://www.myrtlebeachrestaurantnews.com

Find out more about the Restaurant Manager Write-On Handheld Point-of Sale system at http://touchscreenpos.com