Hi-tech fraud gangs plan to exploit the US’s slow uptake of chip and pin technology by using cloned credit cards to fund wide scale shopping sprees here in the UK.
One gang, exposed by a BBC investigation, are said to have accessed the bank account and credit card details of over 2300 Americans in a single month and were planning to clone these onto fake ‘signature only’ cards to use overseas.
According to the BBC these details were acquired from other US based gangs who had managed to tap the phone lines between a number of banks and cash machines, suggesting that more scams of this nature are likely in the near future.
Once created, the fraudsters planned to distribute the cloned cards to so called ‘mules’ who would visit a large number of UK based supermarkets fitted with self-checkout systems, this essential part of the plan would reduce the likelihood of members of staff identifying the cards as fakes.
There, they would purchase high value goods and obtain cash on the cards, maxing out the accounts in the process.
Profits would then be divided between these mules and the fraudsters who coordinated the plan over the internet. One expert working with the BBC predicted that the would-be thieves could net up to £8,000 a day with this con.
Asda and Tesco were reportedly among the supermarkets mentioned in the fraudsters’ online discussions. Both nationwide chains have recently made the targeted self-service checkouts a readily accessible feature in many of their stores, hence their appeal to the criminals.
Tesco have acknowledged that the plan is unlikely to have been foiled by their security systems as these are designed only to flag transactions where cards have been reported stolen.
Worryingly, this type of fraud is becoming increasingly common as criminals continue to find ways to exploit new technology. Exploiting cloned cards overseas is becoming a popular tac as fraudsters are aware that this makes it harder for police in the originating country to track down the perpetrators.
Speaking to the BBC Andrew Moloney, security evangelist at RSA emphasized the growing popularity of this trend:
“We've seen a shift from card-present fraud to card-not-present to fraud abroad," he said.
"The internet is the global marketplace, it's not difficult to take compromised cards from one country and exploit them in another. It's a simple and routine procedure for these guys these days."
