IMGCAP(1)]
Criminals in Ireland late last week posed as point-of-sale terminal engineers in a scheme to make cloned cards, according to an alert the Irish Payment Services Organisation sent Monday. A spokesperson for the group tells CardLine Global this is the first time payment authorities have heard of such a scheme in Ireland. The fraudsters targeted five merchants starting on Thursday, with authorities learning about the scheme by late Friday, the spokesperson says. After persuading the merchants to let them access their terminals and PIN pads, the fraudsters replaced existing devices with machines designed to steal cardholder data. The data were transmitted to the fraudsters, who wanted to produce counterfeit magnetic stripe cards to use in countries without chip-and-PIN systems. Last week, in another fraud-busting incident, authorities in the United Kingdom raided a counterfeit card factory and charged two individuals with conspiracy to defraud through a cloned card scheme aimed at countries without chip-and-PIN systems (CardLine Global, 14 Aug.). On Monday, the UK-based Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit announced another arrest in that case, a man whom authorities say was a software engineer.
