Financial Crime Online

So you want to get money out of an ATM that is not yours. What will be your weapon of choice? Blow it up (and hope that the bills are still worth something and you live to spend them) or start skimming debit cards at an ATM and make counterfeit cards for your personal use? [...]

Heard the story of criminals setting up their own ATM in town to get your card data and PIN number so they can plunder your account? It happened (and not just once). Experts call it a “Ghost ATM”. It is (too?) easy to buy an ATM, place it somewhere and wait for people to use [...]

A recent survey by security vendor Actimize shows that almost 70 percent of financial institutions experienced an increase in ATM/debit card fraud claims in 2008 compared to 2007. Twenty-three percent of respondents say those claims jumped by 5 to 9 percent, while the rest noted growth of anywhere between 10 and 74 percent. These numbers [...]

The ‘Wired’ October issue has an article on skimming; “What’s your magstripe worth?”. Florida is apparently a hotspot for skimming. It could also be the case that skimming is prevalent all across the US and Florida is just a bit more aggressive in prosecution. A review of some Florida court cases show how much (or: [...]

Some dry financial crime numbers (will compensate this post with a more frivolous post later). The Minister of Finance in the Netherlands, Europe, asked the Netherlands’ Association of Bankers to compile data on debit card skimming. The total fraud loss on debit card skimming for Dutch banks is estimated @ 0.023% of total transaction volume, [...]