cashotec.com

Source: The Jordan Times

By Mohammad Ghazal

AMMAN – Police have urged the public to be cautious when using automated teller machines (ATMs), after 12 foreigners were arrested this week for committing ATM fraud.

The thieves, who are believed to have been operating in the country for about two weeks, installed card skimmers and small cameras on ATMs around Amman, using these devices to collect customers’ bank card information and withdraw money from their accounts. No figures were available on the amount of stolen money.

The 12 are believed to be part of a network of ATM thieves working in several countries in the region, said Public Security Department Spokesperson Major Mohammad Khatib.

The gang’s devices made it possible to read bank cards’ magnetic strips and record personal identification numbers (PINs) entered by bank clients, Khatib told The Jordan Times over the phone on Thursday.

The police raided the homes of the gang members, arrested them and seized their laptops, along with numerous fake bank cards on which they stored the stolen data and which they used to make withdrawals or purchases.

One of the 12 was arrested while in possession of about 40 fake cards, Khatib told The Jordan Times.

The officer urged citizens to be careful when using ATMs, to cover their hands when entering their PINs and to check for any suspicious devices before using the machine.

Buthaina Jadoun, whose information was stolen earlier this week by a card reader installed on one of the machines in Al Madina Al Munawara Street, said she lost JD600, all the money that was in her account at the time.

“Last Saturday, I went to withdraw some money from my bank’s branch near the 7th Circle area. As I withdrew JD40, I remembered my brother warning me to be careful when using an ATM as he works as a banker and had heard of a group of ATM thieves in town,” Jadoun, an editor at Hatem children’s magazine, told The Jordan Times.

After withdrawing the money, Jadoun said she was worried and decided to wait in her car to see if anybody came after her to use the machine.

“I saw many Jordanians using the machine after me, but there was a car in front of the machine where there were some blond men who were certainly non-Jordanians. I doubted that they were from the group my brother told me about, but I waited for a few minutes and then left,” she added.

On Tuesday, Jadoun said, she went to withdraw JD600 from her account, but could not.

“I entered the bank and they told me that JD600 were taken from my account in a purchase transaction conducted in a foreign country,” said Jadoun, adding that she will sue the bank if they do not compensate her.

An ATM expert at a local bank, who asked to remain unnamed, said there is no law that stipulates compensation for banks’ clients when money is stolen from their accounts through ATM fraud.

“It is up to the banks to compensate clients in such cases, especially if the withdrawal is from a machine affiliated with the bank the client uses,” said the source.

He recommended that card users change their passwords.

However, the expert said banks should take responsibility for compensating clients in cases of ATM fraud as banks in Jordan are not doing enough to raise awareness among their clients of how to avoid being victims of ATM fraud.

According to the source, some banks in Jordan use certain devices in their ATMs that cannot be tampered with. However, he said banks in Jordan need to pay more attention to raising awareness and installing modern devices that are unbreakable by ATM scammers.

Head of IT at Cairo Amman Bank Omar Yaqoub said the use of ATM skimmers is not only restricted to Jordan as many ATM fraud cases are reported across the world.

Yaqoub said the bank he works at introduced in June the “IrisGuard iBank Suite”, iris scanners, a new technology that uses cameras to obtain eye-prints from customers and then process transactions.

“This technique is reliable and there is no way for fraud and deception as it depends on the iris, and iris of each person is different from another,” he told The Jordan Times.

Source: The Jordan Times