2024-09-24 15:11:00
Romain Rouillard / Photo credit: Jean-Marc Barrere / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP
modified at
5:22 p.m., September 24, 2024
Among the schemes used by scammers to get money from you, “skimming” consists of recovering your bank card data to clone it and use it fraudulently. To do this, the criminals hack payment terminals in which the cards are inserted.
Imagine a credit card that is identical to yours in every way and that could therefore empty your bank account of several thousand euros. A nightmare recently experienced by a resident of Ain who, as the story goes Free Midihad the unpleasant surprise of finding bank withdrawals that she was not the originator of, after having booked a hotel room in Montpellier.
This woman was the victim of “skimming”, a fraud that involves recovering the data on the magnetic strip of a bank card to clone it. The scammers do this through tampered or even hacked payment terminals, such as ATMs or machines installed in gas stations. And can then duplicate the stolen data onto another chip card.
The process does not compromise the proper functioning of the card
The skimmer is “a device that slides into the slot of an ATM while leaving space for a bank card to be slid in naturally”, indicates the Observatory for the Security of Means of Payment (OSMP) in its annual report for 2023. The copying of the data from the magnetic strip is carried out without compromising the proper functioning of the bank card.
These counterfeit cards are then used “for proximity payments or withdrawals for which chip reading is optional, such as for payments at motorway tolls or in countries where smart cards are still not widely used (countries in America or South-East Asia)”, specifies the OSMP.
Data that can be resold
The cloned card can also be used for remote payments on e-commerce sites, mainly non-European, which have not set up a cardholder authentication system. This famous notification from your banking application which asks you to confirm that you are the originator of the payment. The scammers can also decide to resell the data thus collected.
Contacted, the French Banking Federation (FBF), however, emphasizes that “skimming fraud has been in sharp decline over the last few years”. This does not prevent the OSMP from calling on “gas station and ATM managers” to be cautious. To best protect yourself from this scam, it is recommended to regularly monitor your accounts and to favor cash withdrawals from ATMs located inside bank branches.
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