Are you staring at that attractive advertisement for switching credit card companies by transferring your balance from one card to another?

Forget high-tech hacking. One new credit card scam relies more on X-Acto knives and glue sticks than wi-fi and laptops, but helps criminals steal your money just the same. Shaving is a low-tech form of card theft where thieves sort through sets of 16-digit numbers to find one that matches an existing card, and then verifying that number either by trying to make a purchase online or by phone.

The scammers can also buy a list of valid credit card numbers from black market sites online. Once they have their hands on a valid account number, they then create a new card with those numbers by shaving the numbers off of gift cards or expired credit cards and gluing them onto a defunct or stolen card.

The magnetic strip is gouged with a knife or pen so that a store clerk has to manually enter the account number on a keypad, and the charge goes through. Another way consumers can fight shaving is with a credit card account that generates a new number for every new transaction. Citibank offers Virtual Account Numbers to cardholders for online purchases while PayPal provides the Secure Card in the form of a MasterCard debit card.

While these can only be used online, Qsecure is rolling out a SmartStripe credit and debit card that looks like any other card. However, a chip embedded in the card's magnetic stripe automatically generates a different number for each purchase. While many of these offers are truly great deals, balance transfers and card-switching is not something to jump into, eager as you may be.

You need to do your homework first: Do enough research and investigating in order to determine whether it in fact is worth it or a good idea to make the transfer.