If you are using your bank card to make transactions at the ATM, be warned: your money isn’t safe.
Incidences of card skimming are on the increase as a resident of Bedford, a small town in the Eastern Cape, recently found out after he was fleeced of a substantial amount of money.
About two weeks ago Humphrey Tyler, a 75-year-old pensioner, withdrew an amount of R350 from a Standard Bank ATM in Bedford. Two days later his current account experienced a flurry of activity as crooks began helping themselves to the funds in it, using a card they had apparently cloned from his ATM card.
In the next few days a total of more than R6 000 was withdrawn from his account, all from the KwaZulu-Natal region.
It was only on January 31, almost a week later, that Tyler realised he had been robbed. He notified the bank and cancelled all his cards. He laid a charge of fraud at the Bedford Police Station, which the police have confirmed.
Bedford Police Station superintendent Captain Gert Britz said Tyler’s was the only case he was aware of, although there had been rumours of similar incidents involving the same ATM machine in the town.
There are indications that this is a nationwide problem. Card skimming apparently involves the use of a piece of equipment disguised to look like a normal ATM slot that is placed in the existing bank card socket.
The device reads the ATM card number and transmits it to the criminals nearby. Simultaneously, a wireless camera disguised to look like a leaflet holder is mounted in position to view ATM PIN entries.
According to Standard Bank, the fraud has hiked in the past few years and card skimming has risen to the top of the fraud pile as devices are easily available on the internet.
But Pat Pather, director of IT security at Standard Bank, said that skimming remained a small problem relative to the size of Standard Bank’s card base. The bank, he said, offered the My Updates service, which is a free, real-time SMS notification service of transactions in accounts for which customers can register. Other banks such as First National Bank and Absa offer similar services.
The only other way to prevent fraud would be to apply for a smart card.
In March last year Absa became the first bank to introduce chipÂenabled cards to its clients. Chip-enabled cards, or smart cards, have a small PIN-protected microchip embedded in them. The chip is encrypted and the information cannot be copied.
Chip technology was introduced in both the United Kingdom and France in an effort to combat cloning. In a Mail & Guardian article last year Nick Essame of Visa said the UK had seen a marked decrease in card fraud since the introduction of smart cards in February 2006.
Michael Swart, current head of debit cards at Absa, said the issuance of smart cards was happening at low volumes at Absa and had not reach the estimated 50 000 cards by the end of last year. ‘We are currently issuing cards on replacement date, so their impact on reducing incidences of card skimming is too early to detect,†he said.
‘If we think we need to increase our pace because of fraud, we will do so, but currently we don’t think the risk factor is enough for us to change our strategy.â€
He would not divulge how widespread card skimming was at Absa ATMs, but disclosed that even though there has been an increase in the past few years, it was not dissimilar compared with national and international trends.