Monday, January 26, 2009

Beware the debit card swindlers

Five seconds.

"We've looked at the videotape, that's how long it took," said Detective Steve Cook of Hamilton Police Services major fraud unit.

Five seconds was all the fraudsters needed to install the equipment that would rig an automatic banking machine to capture the debit card information from unsuspecting users.

"One guy standing behind to block the view, the other guy takes the pieces out of a gym bag," said Cook. "Five seconds, he walks away, and it's ready to go."

But this is no amateurish duct-tape-and-chewing-gum job being pulled off.

To an untrained eye, it would be difficult to detect that the machine had been compromised.
The level of sophistication involved in today's typical debit card fraud is staggering -- tiny computer processors attached to bank machines, miniature cameras, Bluetooth wireless technology, magnetic stripe encoders, portable safes.

As technology evolves, there's a corresponding evolution in criminal techniques.

Read the rest of this interesting story at:

http://www.thespec.com/News/Discover/article/501278

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