Watch: Romanian fraudsters caught on camera stealing money from an ATM in Kerala
The technique of 'ATM skimming' is on the rise around the country.
That CCTV in the ATM can capture the strangest of events. The video above shows what the camera inside an ATM vestibule in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, picked up. Just another day, except that two Romanians were inserting an object into one of the machines.
This device is reported to have allowed them to drain Rs 2.5 lakh from the accounts of different customers. One of the three suspected to have committed the crime was later arrested by the Mumbai police late on Tuesday.
It is suspected that they used a technique called "skimming", whereby a device is inserted in the ATM slot of the machine to copy the magnetic information coded into a card. This information can later be reproduced on another, fake, card. A tiny camera is used to record the ATM pin for later use.
Unfortunately, ATM users cannot do much to guard against this type of crime. A senior HDFC official told The Indian Express that the only thing to do is to not visit an ATM without a security guard. The Hindu reported that the device was planted in an ATM located in the same building as a State Bank of India branch office.
Below is an excerpt from a documentary titled The French Connection, which explains how ATM skimming is carried out. The figures cited by its makers is that, globally, around € 1 billion is lost to ATM-skimming every year. The video also suggests that most of these crimes are committed by Romanians, and even interviews someone involved with the crimes.
The person interviewed makes € 3,000-4,000 a month in France and doesn't plan to stop anytime soon. "It's got a good future, this job". The video asserts that this industry hasn't flourished in Romania by chance, but because of the presence of a large number of IT technicians accompanied by high unemployment.
Based on these accounts, one safe way for users seems to be hide the keypad while the pin is being keyed in. However, this method only works if the fraudsters are using cameras. If they are using keypad scanners, it's a different matter altogether and there is no stopping them.
Instances of ATM skimming are rising across the globe. In an episode of CBS This Morning, anchor Charlie Rose says that there has been a jump of 500 per cent in this crime. The report also outlines how to figure out if skimming is taking place in an ATM you visited. First by wriggling the card slot or checking to see if there are any obvious seams. Banks are now fighting the crime with cards that have microchips and cannot be duplicated. The solution may lie in contactless cards, which are more secure and more difficult to hack. In June, Visa issued one million such cards in India.
