There’s a new way of stealing money from ATMs:
“Becki Turner got the call from her bank’s fraud department on Labor Day. The investigator wanted to know if she had withdrawn $500 from an ATM in California over the holiday weekend. She hadn’t. She couldn’t. Turner was home in Puyallup, Wash.
“I was just flabbergasted,†she says. “I had the card with me, the ATM was in another state, and the person using the machine had to have my security code.†Turner worried crooks had gotten into the banking system and stolen her password.
It wasn’t anything that complicated. Puyallup police say thieves snagged her account information — along with the debit card numbers and PIN codes of hundreds of other people — at two gas stations in the area.
They did it by installing their own hard-to-spot card reader, called a skimmer, on top of the card reader built into the pump. The skimmer is able to grab the account information from the card without interfering with the legitimate payment transaction.
The crooks used the stolen data to create (or clone) fake debit cards that were used at ATMs in Washington State over the Fourth of July weekend and in Northern California on Labor Day weekend. The bad guys like three-day holidays because it gives them more time to use the cards before the unauthorized withdrawals are spotted.”