Credit Card deceit

Description:

Syndicates are now Bank card skimming at tollgate pay points.


Motorists are advised to pay cash and do not than hand over credit cards at toll roads.


The latest is happening at the Mariannhill plaza toll just 10 kilometre east of Durban where a worker was arrested by police from Durban’s commercial crime unit.


The culprit has appeared in court on charges of skimming at least 150 cards over the past three months.
According to the Police this incident is part of a bigger syndicate which also operated at a bookshop at Durban’s new King Shaka Airport.

It is calculated that so far these crimes have cost banks and their customers more than R3-million, excluding any crimes committed with cards skimmed from overseas tourists.


Three others have been arrested and more arrests are expected pending investigations.


After credit card skimming was identified as a priority crime the breakthrough came as a result of heightened public awareness through training given by police and the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) before the World Cup,
In another related case a cashier at Exclusive Books at King Shaka Airport was arrested at work on July 7, the day of the World Cup semi-final between Germany and Spain in Durban.


This followed investigations by the banks which showed that the shop was a “common point of compromise” for cards suspected to have been cloned.


An investigation led the police to a house in Verulam, the home of another Exclusive Books employee and her partner a Nigerian national and was also arrested as it was found that this house was a “card cloning factory”.
Apart from another skimming device - used to capture the information on the magnetic strips of bank cards - police found two compact discs containing the software needed to transfer the information from the skimming device to the computer.
Police found a laptop and a card reader and writer which were used to transfer information from the computer on to any plastic card containing a magnetic strip.


38 plastic cloned cards were also seized.


Three driver’s licences, two Nigerian and one British, were found in the house, all bearing a photograph of the Nigerian but with different names.


An analysis of the laptop revealed 102 data files containing information of 482 cloned cards.
The point of compromise for more than 150 of these was the Mariannhill toll plaza.

Travellers are urged to be vigilant at all times. And report suspect card cloning immediately.