New York, NY – “Cloned” debit cards have been used to steal more than $200,000 from Long Island banks between April and the end of May, police said.
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The scam involves the use of a device known as a “skimmer” or a “parasite,” a piece of equipment made to look exactly like an ATM’s bank-card reader. The skimmer is slipped over the ATM’s regular card slot, and when a legitimate customer slides in a bank card the device records the customer’s banking information, even while allowing the transaction to be conducted, according to Det. Sgt. Stephen Jensen, head of the Suffolk County Police’s Identity Theft Unit.
Mr. Jensen said the scammers were able to obtain customers’ PINs one of two ways: Either they used a hidden, wireless mini-camera pointed toward the ATM’s keypad that captured people punching in their PINs, or they affixed a thin keypad overlay to the keypad that recorded the PINs on a tiny circuit board built into the device.
The suspects were able to re-encode the pilfered debit-card information onto the magnetic strips of blank gift cards. Mr. Jensen said it appears the bank-card information was stolen in February and March but wasn’t used until April and May.
He said the thefts occurred at four Bank of America branches in Suffolk County, but he declined to identify them, citing the on-going investigation. He said Bank of America, which reimburses its customers for fraudulent withdrawals, has pegged its loss so far at $217,000. He estimated that between 100 and 200 accounts may have been cloned.
Police released photographs of six suspects.
Joseph Russo, a retired Secret Service supervisor who headed the agency’s Credit Card Fraud Squad, said skimming has been around for the past 30 years in one form or another. The crime “really took off,” he said, in the mid to late-1990s, when criminals got their hands on magnetic strip reader/recorders.
Mr. Russo, now senior vice president at T & M Protection Resources, recalled one case in which waiters were given small skimming devices they affixed to the insides of their jackets. They’d surreptitiously swipe the cards and return them to customers. The information was sold to gang members in China who created clones that could be used halfway around the world the next day.
“It took us a long time to figure out how a card was getting burned up in Hong Kong when it was still in the guy’s wallet,” Mr. Russo said.