Thieves turn a simple strip into cutting-edge scam tool

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

By Byron ACOHIDO and JON SWARTZ Gannett News Service

SEATTLE

When it come ups to information storage, the familiar "mag- stripe" on the dorsum of your plastic card game is about as simple and omnipresent a piece of engineering as you can find.

Consisting of magnetized atoms impregnated on a thin band, it is the decades-old technology that brands credit, debit entry and gift card minutes possible. It is also widely used on employee entree cards, public theodolite tokens, telephone career cards, even hotel card keys.

Now the humble magstripe have go a favourite tool of personal identity thieves on the film editing edge, state law enforcement functionaries and technical school security analysts.

The apprehension in April of a suspected personal identity stealer in Edmonton, Canada, have cast visible light on one recent inventive scam. Acting on a tip, Edmonton police force arrested a 26-year-old man sitting in a shopping promenade eating house typing away on his laptop, and in ownership of pollex thrusts and computing machine printouts of recognition card business relationship information stolen from 100s of U.S. and Canadian depository financial institution customers.

The suspect also had respective postpaid gift card game issued by Visa and MasterCard, and a device for embedding information on a magstripe, called a "magstripe reader-writer," states the sensational officer, Edmonton Detective British Shilling Gauthier.

How it's done: By altering the magstripes of reliable depository financial institution gift cards, the suspect bypassed a hard and hazardous measure other magstripe swindlers are forced to take: fabricating bogus recognition cards.

"Instead of having to do bogus plastic, you can lade up depository financial institution gift card game with purloined information you acquire from people online, then travel in and usage them like cash," states Gauthier.

Sounds like easy loot. In fact, payment card fraud overall remains at wieldy levels, and magstripe scams, in particular, are hard to orchestrate, states Brian Triplett, senior frailty president of emerging merchandise development at Visa USA. Crooks have got to overcome a security codification on the magstripe as well as machine-controlled systems that ticker for and alert the credit-issuing depository financial institution to leery transactions.

"Every Visa dealing that travels through our web is rated for fraud potentiality in existent time," states Rosetta Jones, frailty president at Visa USA. "Our attack is not only to protect card-holder data, we're also exploring advanced ways to render that information useless."

Yet criminals clearly are giving it a go. No precise measurements of the degrees of magstripe fraud are available. But the apprehension in Edmonton followed the dissolution in March of a Miami-based ring of thieves recruited to help in an luxuriant -- and moneymaking -- magstripe scam.

.