Untraced culprits defrauding European credit card holders

A highly-sophisticated credit-card fraud was detected by European law-enforcement authorities in Britain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. The fraud scheme transferred account data to Pakistan from hundreds of grocery-store card machines across Europe.

The financial information was used for repeated bank withdrawals and Internet purchases, such as airline tickets, in several countries, including the US. The violators are still not traced. As per preliminary estimates, the losses range of $50 million to $100 million.

The fraudsters use untraceable devices inserted into credit-card readers that were made in China. These devices selectively transmit account data through a wireless connection to computer servers in Lahore and constantly change the pattern of theft which makes these malefactors hard to detect.

By the moment hundreds of machines in the courtiers mentioned above were found to have such devices. As per informal sources among those European chains impacted by the fraud there is Asda owned by Wal-Mart; Tesco; and J Sainsbury PLC though the latter denied any fraud incident in the chain.

The device copies certain types of transactions — for example, five Visa platinum cards or every tenth transaction. Besides, it can be commanded to be inactive so as to avoid detection. Averagely only 5 to 10 card numbers are phoned in to Pakistan.