URBANA – Lt. Bryant Seraphin of the Urbana Police Department offers advice to consumers following charges filed against three people for a credit card "cloning" operation that police say cost consumers more than $10,000.

Credit card cloning electronically copies credit card details onto a bogus card that works like the original.

"The best advice I could give you is to keep your card in your sight," Seraphin said. "Simply hang onto it."

According to Seraphin, credit card cloners often use a pocket-sized device that may resemble a pager with a scanning slot. They swipe the credit cards through the device, which copies the information on the magnetic strip of the card into memory. The information is then copied onto a counterfeit card.

"Usually there is a computer involved," Seraphin said. "If you keep the card in your sight, you can make sure somebody isn't swiping your card to record information."

But Seraphin said he realizes some situations require a credit card to be taken out of sight.

"If you are going out to dinner and pay with a credit card, the waiter often walks off with the card," Seraphin said. "When they bring it back, you don't know where the card has been."

Seraphin said another option might be to pay for meals with cash rather than credit or debit card.

Seraphin advises consumers to check the balances on all their credit cards frequently.

"You can go online to check your balance, or you can call the credit card company to check the balance," he said. "I know people who check them almost daily. Other people check them weekly."

According to an Urbana police report, a Champaign man reported on Thursday that somebody else had made more than $1,000 of purchases at the Urbana Meijer using funds from his debit card.

The victim said that he still physically possessed his debit card, but somebody used another card encoded with his bank information to make the purchases at Meijer.

Over the next two days, Urbana police, with help from the staff at Meijer and officials at Busey Bank, discovered that other debit and credit card accounts had been similarly compromised. All of the victims had the same thing in common: They had used their cards at McDonald's at 1812 N. Neil St., Champaign, at breakfast time during the first week of February.

Police say a McDonald's employee had been swiping customers' cards through a personal magnetic card reader, which captured the customers' financial information.

That information, in turn, was encoded onto other cards, which were used at other stores in the area, including Meijer. The total loss at all the stores was more than $10,000, according to the report.

On Sunday, Urbana police arrested Julie L. Howard, 19, who listed addresses in Urbana and Rantoul, at the McDonald's restaurant, on a preliminary charge of financial identity theft.

After conducting additional interviews, looking at footage from a surveillance video and executing a search warrant, police also arrested Donnell Edwards, 18, who listed an address in Savoy, and Lacal D. James, 20, who listed an address in Urbana, on a preliminary charge of financial identity theft.

Howard, Edwards and James were all taken to the Champaign County Jail.

All three pleaded innocent Monday to felony burglary. Bond was set at $10,000 for Howard and Edwards and at $15,000 for James.

The next court appearance for all three of them was scheduled for March 16.