Chip-and-Pin Thieves Defraud Retailers of $1.1 Million

Retail experts believe it's a matter of a few years before chip-and-pin technology is mandated in the U.S. It is already in Canada and Europe, where retailers have gone through great expense to implement it. Unfortunately, thieves have defeated the technology with spectacular results, recently netting $1.1 million from customer credit and debit cards in the U.K. The good news is they were caught.

 

The criminal gang secretly fitted devices in chip-and-pin readers that gave them access to duplicate credit and debit cards. They were able to do this by burning a small hole in the readers and inserting a memory chip and Bluetooth reader to record and trasmit credit card data. Police believe the criminal gang may have had inside help from some retail staff.

 

The fraudulent credit cards were used over a nine-month period before the perpetrators were caught. The leader of the gang was sentenced recently to four-and-a-half years in prison. When he was arrested the leader's laptop housed data for 35,000 credit cards.  

 

Chip-and-pin technology, which replaces a magnetic stripe on a credit card with a microchip and then authenticates the identity of the shopper by entering a personal identification number (PIN), has reportedly reduced fraud in France by 80 percent. The name chip-and-pin specifically refers to the U.K. technology, which is incompatible with what is used in France.