BENGALURU: The next time you use your debit or credit card to shop, beware. Identity thieves could be stealing your card details to clone it and loot you.
On Monday, the city police arrested a gang making money using such cloned cards. The accused have been identified as Jaikumar (42), Irfan Ahmed (32), Waseem Shariff (26), Tajamul Ahmed (37) and Raghavendra (33), all residents of Bengaluru.
Police said the accused were targeting people who use their debit cards to shop. One of the accused, Jaikumar, installed a scanner in the swiping machine, which revealed the debit card’s details and the password. He later cloned details of the card onto a fresh card.
They had opened accounts in many banks and used to transfer the money using the cloned cards. Police have seized Rs 5,82,000 in cash, five electronic data capture machines, five mobile phones, two laptops, 15 debit and visa cards and three cars from the arrested.
Police suspect that more people may be involved in this scam. Jaikumar already has several cases against him in Jayanagar, Sampigehalli, Cottonpet and even Tamil Nadu police stations.
What is Skimming?
Skimming is the process of illegally extracting details of a debit card. Skimming can occur both at the point-of-sale, especially in restaurants, bars and petrol stations, as well as at cash machines.
Fraudsters sometimes enlist a vulnerable employee to use the card on an unauthorised device that records the data contained on the magnetic strip.
Alternatively, they fit a skimming device around the card entry slot of a cash machine to copy the card’s data without the user’s knowledge. A tiny camera is placed above the PIN pad to record the PIN. The data is often collected from hundreds of cards and sold to criminal organisations who manufacture the cloned cards.