TINASHE MAKICHI
The local financial sector has been hit by an increasing number of bank cards cloning in which fraudsters are targeting individuals and companies with large sums of cash in their accounts.
This has seen various people falling victims to this new found form of cybercrime where the latest cases have seen clients losing their money shortly after transacting either on an Automated Teller Machines (ATM) or a Point of Sale machine.
In the past, the fraudsters used to phone their victims alleging they are employees from banks wanting to collect depositors’ personal information.
Nowadays, cybercrime is a serious problem in Zimbabwe and the world including banking industries where card cloning has become a huge concern.
In various countries, banks have been giving magnetic stripe cards to their customers, which have proven not to be secure because card cloning of magnetic stripe cards has been easy and cybercriminals have been making cloned cards easily using an electronic device known as skimmer.
For the past two weeks there have been increasing reports of people losing their hard-earned funds through card cloning where they would see their money being wiped out from their accounts.
Bankers Association of Zimbabwe president Ralph Watungwa said the industry body had received reports of cybercrimes saying depositors have to be careful when they use their bank cards.
“This has been a trend for some time and this is not something new across the world which is the reason why we always tell depositors to guard jealously their personal and bank information to strangers.
Depositors should also be mindful of where they use their bank cards as this has also exposed them to cyber fraudsters,” said Watungwa.
Business Times heard this week that the card cloning syndicate is being allegedly run in connivance with bank personnel and in some instances supermarket tellers.
Recently, one customer lost close to ZWL$300, 000 at one go at a supermarket in Borrowdale (name withheld).
“It was a sad day as I could see my money being wiped out while watching. I have since reported the matter to Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) but I have not been the only victim of this scam,” said the customer who could not be named for fear of jeopardising investigations.
Finance experts say there is a strong need to eliminate magnetic stripe cards from banking industries and issue chip-based cards to the bank customers so that their money can be secured in the banks.
The idea on the part of fraudsters is that once they get the account details, they then siphon money from the targeted accounts.
The world over, gold or platinum cards are normally targeted because of their higher credit limit, meaning the bank takes longer to realise there is a problem and criminals spend, on average, about US$2,800 per card, with large and frequent transactions typically over a two-day period before discarding the card, according to one expert.
While the whole process of getting a cloned card onto the streets can take less than a day, the customer is none the wiser, since his own credit card is in his/her wallet.
In fact, victims may not realise they have been taken until they check their statements at the end of the month and by that time fraudsters will have already moved with all the paper trail destroyed.
Several local depositors have in the past two weeks lost money to criminals and the Zimbabwe Republic Police believes the criminals are cloning bank cards using modern technology to steal money from unsuspecting depositors.
Another team of fraudsters has a tendency of contacting their targeted victims using either a landline or cellphone, purporting to be an employee of a certain bank and allege to be doing some security checks on the victim’s account before requesting a personal identification number (PIN).
Recently there have been circulating social media reports on CABS account holders who had been duped.
The hacks have left many Zimbabwean customers wondering how it was possible for the criminal group to clone bank cards since chip-and PIN technology was advertised as a way to stop such attacks.
But in reality, such attacks are possible and have been happening for a few years and the fact that they happened in Zimbabwe is also no surprise as the country’s local cybercriminal gangs have a reputation of being able to clone bank cards, according to various reports made to the Police.
To obtain customer personal information, criminals often rely on card sniffing devices installed on ATMs or POS terminals, which are also suspected as the primary sources for the debit cards.
As Kaspersky pointed out in its 2018 report, a valid PIN isn’t always even needed, with some cloned cards working with any random PIN entered in a POS or ATM terminal. For the past few years, detecting withdrawals from cloned bank cards has been a problem for banks around the world.
