Fraude bancária... de novo!

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Aqui uma notícia interessante sobre fraude bancária por aqui. Nossa conta tem sido alvo de fraude desde que chegamos (várias vezes)... e nada muda. Se muda, tinha que ser mais rápido que os ladrões... Apesar da data, a notícia parece super atual, e acho que não mudou muito de lá pra cá. Os cartões agora estão vindo com chip, mas os ladrões sabem mais de tecnologia que os bancos daqui do Canada.

CTV.ca News Staff

Date: Sat. Jan. 8 2005 6:49 PM ET

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/WFive/20050108/wfive_debit_card_fraud_010801/

Canadians use debit cards more than anybody else in the world. They've changed the way we shop and how we bank. But what most debit card users don't know is that along with the convenience comes a very real risk.

Lorne Turcotte of Kingston, Ontario, knows all about it. One Sunday morning in July he went to his bank to take out some money and to his surprise his account was frozen. According to the bank his account had been "compromised."

Turcotte told W-FIVE that all he knew was that somebody had taken the money out of his account and he was overdrawn by over $1,000. Getting his money back was a big hassle and according to Turcotte, the people at the bank's head office in Toronto were rude and suspicious.

But the men who ripped-off Turcotte and other unsuspecting Canadians, were captured on bank security cameras.

The thieves installed two devices on the ATM: a miniature camera and a fake front that looks like the bank's card reader. The reader records bank account information as the card is passed through it and the camera allows the crooks to see the PIN. With that information the thieves can use a computer and a card-writer to make an exact duplicate of the debit card and help themselves to the money in the account.

During one weekend in Kingston, along with Lorne Turcotte, more than 50 people had their bank accounts cleaned out.

But what happened to Turcotte was happening to Canadians across the country.

W-FIVE recently picked up the trail of the biggest debit card scam in Canada's history in Toronto.

There, a gang of Eastern Europeans mostly from Romania was installing false fronts on bank ATMs - complete with miniature cameras and false card readers. Treating it like big business, these crooks were hitting dozens of machines at the same time and making a fortune. At one point it's estimated the thieves had pocketed $4 million.

Det. Jim French and Ken Reimer launched a special investigation called project BAM to try to track the thieves. They traced them to an apartment building in suburban Toronto. There they found a gang of Eastern Europeans who were brazen enough to assemble the tools of their illegal trade right out in the open.

But just as Reimer and French were getting to know the players involved, a large group of them disappeared.

Eventually one of the vehicles the gang was driving turned-up in Edmonton, enabling police to track them to Calgary. Within hours of their arrival police started tailing them.

"Our surveillance team set up and watched this particular group install a card reader and a camera on the ATM machine," said Detective Bryan Adams of Calgary.

In just two hours time, the gang got away with 35 customers' card information. In just a few days they had collected enough information to steal nearly $650,000. Adams and the Calgary police force made their move and arrested eight people. Others were arrested in Toronto, Montreal and several other Canadian cities and by the time it was over more than 58 gang members had been charged. In total, they had stolen more than $10 million.

Unfortunately, as Adams and his colleagues across the country soon discovered, the Romanian gang had built up such momentum, that even the arrest of dozens of members couldn't stop them. Less than a year after the arrests in Calgary, the gang struck again.

In early July police in Vancouver arrested three men for debit card fraud � all Romanians. One of the three men � Dumitri Gabureac � was "subject to a warrant for parole variation. That means he was on parole after serving time for committing the same crime in Ontario.

According to RCMP Superintendent Gordon McRae, a jail term, whether it is short or long seems to be the cost of doing business to these crooks � and then they're back at it again.

There is little wonder why debit card fraud is on the rise. The punishment for this crime is mild at best. For example, Vasile Ciocan is a repeat offender; he has been arrested six times for fraud. His punishment? A few days in jail here, a fine there. Even being part of a multi-million dollar crime gets little more than a slap on the wrist.

According to Peter Hope-Tindall, an expert in computer security, Canada is the perfect country for this crime because Canadian banks are still using a security system that's easy to crack. All that stands between thieves and your money is your pin number and the little black stripe on the back of your bankcard.

Hope-Tindall said the magnetic strip security used by debit cards "is about as secure as writing on a postcard and putting that postcard in the mail. Anybody who handles it can pick up your postcard and read it if they want."

"Twenty years ago Mag Stripes were secure because we had in place something called security through obscurity," Hope-Tindall explains. "It was hard for people to read the cards and people didn't understand the cards. That isn't the case anymore."

In fact, all the tools a thief would need to commit this crime � including a surveillance camera, card reader and writer, and software that reprograms blank cards � can be purchased online and its perfectly legal.

But if you don't want to spend the 20 minutes it takes to hunt for these items online, you can find most of them at websites run by companies like Canadian Barcode. According to police this company provided "one stop shopping for persons who wish to carry out debit card fraud."

A few months ago, police charged Canadian Barcode with assisting criminal organizations involved in debit card fraud. The company insists it has done nothing wrong.

So if magnetic stripe cards are so easily compromised, why are banks still using them?

There is an alternative to magnetic stripe technology -- "Smart Cards". These cards are implanted with a computer chip that uses encryption to protect the information.

"Most of these smart cards are designed in such a way that if you did try to reverse engineer them, try to open them up, break them open and find the magic key inside that makes them work, they will zero out their contents," said Hope-Tindall.

Some Canadian credit cards use this chip technology, as do several European banks that have dramatically reduced fraud in Europe.

But Paul McGrath, Director of Security at the Canadian Bankers Association, insists the magnetic stripe technology is "still very safe".

"The banks have never had their systems compromised as far as anybody getting into the systems themselves," said McGrath.

While the banks may not have been compromised, the bank's customers have been continually compromised. When asked by W-FIVE how banks are responding to this problem McGrath says they are taking the impact on their customers very seriously.

Yet taking the problem seriously does not mean the banks plan to switch to new technology that could reduce debit card fraud in the near future.

In fact, McGrath also told W-FIVE that the Canadian Bankers Association does not consider debit card fraud to be a major crime despite the fact that about 27,000 Canadians have been victims of this crime to the tune of $44 million in 2003.

"When you look at the amount of cards and you look at the amount of the transactions and then you look at the amount of impact on those cards, it appears to be very, very minimal," McGrath told W-FIVE.

The banks public position is the system is still intact and protected. There are no problems with magnetic stripe security and therefore no need to change over to chip technology.

But there may be other reasons the banks don't want to change to chip technology. One primary factor could be cost.

Banking experts estimate it would cost the banking system in Canada approximately $500-million to produce the chip technology (smart cards) for the debit card system while debit card fraud costs a mere $44-million in 2003 in comparison. One might think the banks have concluded it's cheaper to pay off the bad guys than it is to help the good guys.

"I don't think so at all," McGrath says. "That's not money well spent. The money is better spent when we protect our customers and the infrastructure of the system in Canada.

But while the banks continue to insist that its customers' money is completely safe, the thieves who stole money from Lorne Turcotte in Kingston are still at large.

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