PIN-pointing the problem

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca

You are at a grocery store or dépanneur, and do not want to break a $20 bill. You whip out your bank or credit card to pay and one quick swipe is all it takes. A scanning device inside the keypad reads your personal information, and your card is ready to be “cloned,” its information duplicated.

“It even happened to me recently,” said Montreal police Station 3 community relations officer Dan Maheu. “I was at the McDonald's on St. John's and happened to pay with my credit card. Twenty minutes later, I got a call telling me my credit card had been cloned.”

Maheu said he let the restaurant’s owner know about the problem immediately, and it was not long before the employee responsible was found and fired. “In some cases, the employee at the store is in cahoots with the thieves. In others, the employees find themselves coerced,” Maheu said.

McDonald's declined to comment on the incident, but stated that the company has recently taken measures to beef up security at all restaurants.

Though Maheu does not think card fraud is more prevalent in the West Island than anywhere else in Montreal, his station went on a blitz at the end of 2007, meeting all shopkeepers in the area to sensitize them to the problem. “We had good results. Two shopkeepers approached us to tell us they had been forced into helping fraudsters install cloning devices into their keypads,” he said.

James Mousseau, director general of Scotiabank branches in the West Island, said he is aware of the problem, but also did not think it was specific to the area. “I'm not ready to release any statistics,” he added. “I believe 98 to 99 per cent of these problems could be solved if people were just more careful.”

Mousseau suggested customers should follow basic rules to avoid problems. “Anybody can replicate a card, but they cannot access your information unless they have your PIN,” he explained.

He has even heard of people who keep their PIN numbers written down on a small piece of paper attached to their card, or in their wallets. That piece of paper can easily fall off without the cardholder noticing, he said, and end up in the wrong hands.

Pointe Claire resident Dionne Codrington, a TD Canada Trust customer, said she has had her card cloned twice in as many years, with the latest incident happening last August. “I use my debit card for just about everything,” she confessed. “I suspect (it's cloned) when I use it at the gas pumps, but who knows?”

A string of recent debit keypad thefts in the West Island may be connected to card fraud. Last Wednesday, four men entered a gas station in Dorval and escaped with one of its keypads. Local police said two of them were caught.

Similar incidents occurred in Fairview Pointe Claire shopping centre and at a Jean Coutu in Beaconsfield in October. Maheu said stolen keypads can be fitted with card-scanning devices, returned to the store either with the help of an accomplice or through coercion, and reinstalled.

“We made some arrests last year,” he said. “I would say the people we arrested are part of networks operating in numbers but we don't call them ‘street gangs.’”

At a news conference on street gangs last Thursday, however, Montreal police vice-director and head of the ‘street gang’ file, Mario Plante, said major gangs may indeed be engaged in card fraud across the Island of Montreal.

Both Plante and Mousseau said their financial institutions and police fraud teams collaborate to catch fraudsters.