Suddenly card fraud rocketed
Suddenly card fraud rocketed.A typical fraud involved a customer losing his card in the machine, which was picked up by an insider. Meanwhile an outside accomplice in the queue memorised the Personal Identification Number (PIN). The crooks then emptied the account.Abbey National was plagued by a variation on this scam. Villains used video equipment with powerful lenses to record the numbers customers were keying into the ATMs, plus the details from the front of the plastic.
Then a gang installed a fake machine in an east London shop front – bodged together from the discarded shell of a dispenser never used in this country, and a PC screen. They got away with pounds 100,000.Richard Tyson-Davies, a spokesman for Apacs, that controls the banks’ payment and accounting systems, says: “When customers used the machine, a message appeared saying it was out of cash. Some came back four times, without noticing that they were looking into a PC screen – nothing like an ATM screen.” The latest heist used a more sophisticated version of this. Villains mounted a false keypad over the real one, so they could record people’s PINs. They also inserted a false slot in the real slot, and recorded information coded in the card’s magnetic stripe. This time customers got both the cash and their cards back.The banks are cagey about exactly how these false instruments work. But sophisticated security cracking electronic equipment of this kind is available on the black market in Europe.
Though the scam first came to light in York, and police believe attacks on dispensers have been limited to the Midlands and the North, mainly at supermarket ATMs, fake cards have been used all over the country, far into the South.A basic read-write machine can be bought legitimately via a specialist business supplier, or, more typically, change hands in a pub for about pounds 400. It lets information stored in a card’s magnetic stripe be read and copied on to a dummy card. Customers who let their credit cards out of their sight in restaurants are particularly vulnerable to what is called “hot card” spending. Where criminals counterfeit a card like this, and also get the PIN number – perhaps by following their victim to an ATM – they can empty the account.Whatever we have been told, until PIN and magnetic cards are replaced by an alternative system, our money is not as safe as we think.So what are the alternatives? Nationwide successfully conducted a trial on cash machines using the iris of an eye to recognise ownership and access. But the prohibitive cost of installing them across the country has ruled them out for now.Banks are placing their hopes on smart cards using a computer chip. Barclays has issued about 500,000 so far, and hopes to have rolled out three million by year’s end They say these are almost impossible to copy. Impossible? Or just another challenge for the criminal fraternity?HOW TO BEATTHE CHEATSUse the same cash dispensers regularly, so you become familiar with them.
Never touch a machine which looks in any way suspicious.Be particularly waryabout so-called remote machines, away from bank branches. These are the most vulnerable to fraud.Never allow anyoneto watch over your shoulder when tapping in a PIN. If possible conceal the number with your other hand.Always check your bank statements carefully.Try never to let your card out of your sight, particularly in restaurants. Ask the waiter to bring the machine to the table, or take your card to the till yourself.. SOMETHING IS going on There is no doubt about that. Are we watching the biggest market bubble since the Dutch went bananas about tulip bulbs or is there, as the cognoscenti like to say, a paradigm shift going on?
Earlier this week Dixons, the electrical chain, confirmed plans for a separate flotation of Freeserve, its free Internet service, which has racked up more than one million new customers since launch in late 1998.
Valuations of Freeserve range from pounds 1.8bn to pounds 3bn.
Is Freeserve – and the many other Internet-linked firms whose dizzying rise in share prices have confounded stockmarket experts – really worth that much?On 19 April, some Wall Street watchers thought the crash had come. The 15 constituent companies in the Dow Jones Internet Commerce Index fell by a record 17 per cent while the technology-heavy Nasdaq Index recorded its second-worst points fall, down 138.43 or 5.6 per cent. Yet, since then, it has been back to normal for many Internet stocks, taking the up elevator.. Two days later Nasdaq roared up 6.1 per cent.The Internet feeding frenzy has been mostly an US phenomenon, but it has not entirely passed the UK by. On 1 January, 1998, the new FTSE Information Technology sub-index began.
