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Thirteen airlines and a number of technology companies are signing non-disclosure agreements with investigators this week as a full-scale forensic investigation of the self-service kiosks at Toronto's Pearson International Airport gets under way.

Visa has been investigating credit-card systems at Canada's busiest airport because its high-tech monitoring systems, called "neural networks," flagged a pattern of fraud on credit cards of some people who had flown out of Toronto.

American Express and MasterCard were also aware of the problem and are monitoring the situation.

Visa initially looked at the parking systems and stores and outlets at the airport, but those credit-card systems were deemed to be secure. The investigation then turned to the 150 self-service check-in kiosks at Pearson where passengers can use a credit card, passport, or other information to obtain boarding passes. It has not been determined whether any information has gone missing from the system.

The airlines and technology companies that are tied to the system have all agreed to allow a forensic investigation, which will begin this week and is expected to take several weeks.

"Everyone's on board," said Scott Armstrong, a spokesman for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, the not-for-profit corporation that runs the airport and owns the kiosks.

Mr. Armstrong said this month that the GTAA had checked the kiosks and found that the machines were secure. It licenses the software for the system and does not see the information the flows through it.

Robert Grapes, chief technologist at Cloakware, a database security company, said it sounds as though skimming devices were not found in the machines. That doesn't rule out a potential breach at the software or network level, he said.

Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon had discussions with the GTAA and Visa this week and was told that there are currently no confirmed cases of fraud at the kiosks.