Houston woman finds credit card skimmer at southwest grocery store

A southwest Houston grocery run turned into a fraud scare for Savannah Dansby when her EBT card snagged at the register at Pyburn’s Grocery Store on Fondren Road near Fonmeadow Boulevard. Dansby said she pulled the device off the checkout machine and realized it was a credit card skimmer, a reminder that these overlays can show up on grocery terminals as easily as at gas pumps or ATMs.

Dansby notified employees, posted photos on Nextdoor and contacted police. Houston police were dispatched to the store, the call log showed. She also checked her account and planned to lock her card, a small decision that can still lead to days of cleanup, from monitoring transactions to replacing a compromised card.

The incident landed just ahead of Memorial Day weekend, when Harris County shoppers were making extra trips to grocery stores and convenience stops. That timing matters because skimmers are built to sit on top of legitimate payment terminals and capture card data from unsuspecting customers in a few seconds. The Secret Service says criminals can then use that data to make fraudulent purchases or sell it on the dark web.

Federal agents have spent the spring warning that skimming is not limited to one kind of store or one kind of machine. In a Harris County outreach operation on May 13 and 14, the U.S. Secret Service and local partners visited 372 businesses, inspected 3,175 point-of-sale terminals, gas pumps and ATMs, recovered 14 illegal skimming devices and estimated they prevented $14.5 million in losses. The operation included the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, the Houston Police Department, the Santa Fe Police Department, the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation.

The agency says skimming hits grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations, and it costs consumers and financial institutions more than $1 billion each year. Nationally, the Secret Service said it carried out 22 skimming outreach operations in 2025, visited more than 9,000 businesses, removed 411 illegal devices and estimated more than $428.1 million in losses prevented.

Houston has seen the threat before. In May 2025, Secret Service Special Agent Matthew Connolly described a recent uptick in SNAP skimming cases and pointed to point-of-sale overlay devices and deep-insert ATM skimmers as part of a national trend. In December 2023, investigators described a Sunnyside Airbnb as a “skimmer manufacturing lab,” underscoring that this is often the work of organized, mobile crews rather than a lone thief.

For shoppers in southwest Houston, the warning is immediate: look for loose or suspicious parts on a card reader, skip any terminal that looks altered and call law enforcement if something seems off before the transaction is complete. A quick glance at the register can be the difference between a routine grocery trip and a compromised card.