The government - which is campaigning ahead of the NSW election on 22 March - said it would legislate to create two new offences specifically targeting the practice, each with a maximum penalty of 10 years.
The move comes after incidents of theft from St George Bank customers late last year and the recent seizure by NSW police of a credit card skimming device from an automatic teller machine in Pyrmont in Sydney.
The NSW Police Minister, Michael Costa, said in a statement "the law must keep pace with technology".
"Police intelligence has revealed thieves are reprogramming credit card readers, which are easily obtained because they are legitimately used by most retailers to carry out credit card transactions," he said in a statement.
"But criminals are reprogramming these devices and turning them into 'skimmers' to commit crime.
"And they are manufacturing purpose-built machines which can be hidden inside ATMs, making them difficult to spot".
Costa said he planned to propose two new offences, to operate in addition to existing fraud, forgery and benefit-by-deception laws. These would make it illegal to:
ââ,¬Â¢ manufacture, repair, traffic or possess any device adapted to be used in connection with forging or falsifying credit cards, or; ââ,¬Â¢ unlawfully possess, use or traffic in credit card data .
At last. But once again the politicians are reacting long after the event & a lot of publicity. It's a pity they don't listen to the police & credit industry & try to prevent credit card crime. Almost every major lender in the country has the technology to identify that there is a major problem with stolen/counterfeit driver's licences - particularly NSW - so why doesn't the RTA allow driver's licence details to be validated? Perhaps if the statistics for fraud involving the use of stolen/counterfeit driver's licences for just one month were made public, the public reaction would see a change in the current practice.