There’s been a story in the press recently about a man who used 49 cloned credit cards to steal £10,000 from a cash point.

It was late at night, and it took him two hours to do it. Whenever anyone wanted to use the machine, he politely stood back. And then went on stealing money with another card.

What he didn’t know was that a CCTV was filming him at Barclay’s Chislehurst branch, so police are hoping to catch him.

 In 2007 over £535 million was lost to credit card fraud. Both the card details and the pin are needed by criminals. In the past much crime at cash points originated from “shoulder surfing”, where criminals would watch numbers being inserted, and either pick pocketing the card afterwards or taking the card after distracting the victim by say dropping a fiver.  

Another method is using card-trapping devices. A plastic loop is inserted into the card slot which traps and retains the customer's card. The "Lebanese loop" is so-called because it was allegedly first used by a Lebanese gang. The criminal poses as a helpful bystander and suggests that the victim re-enters the pin, which he memorises. After the card-holder gives up and leaves, the fraudster removes the device, along with the card.

Increasingly the card details are derived by sophisticated means. This could be a “skimming" device placed over the card slot, which captures card details from the magnetic strip. In addition, a miniature camera hidden inside a strip of metal fixed unobtrusively to the top of the machine watches as the customer punches in the pin number. Details from both are sent by wireless to criminals who typically be will be using a laptop in a van parked around the corner. There is sometimes an entire, simulated frontage to conceal these details. A cloned card is then swiftly manufactured for use together with the pin number.  

Police say many of those targeting ATMs in this way are Romanian criminal gangs, who typically buy legally available pinhole cameras and card reader equipment of the sort used in some workplaces for gaining entry, and then adapt them for their own ends.

Banks, of course, are not just sitting idly by while all this is happening. The banking industry has since 2002 been funding a specialist police unit, the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit. They claim to have saved £130 millions in card fraud. In November 2004 Barclays announced that they had begun trials of an anti-skimming device that had virtually eradicated cash point fraud for banks using them on the continent, and they claim to be the only UK bank to have such devices.
Details are, very probably, confidential, but a search on the Internet suggests that it is a physical barrier which prevents the spying equipment to be installed, or which closes down the machine if there is an effort to install it. In January 2008 there was a report of anti-skimming devices being smashed at a Newbury branch of the bank, which meant that the machines were out of order.

There are a couple of patents for such equipment. British patent 2421300 by a private inventor detects a reduction in light if a dummy front is placed over it. More sophisticated is WO 2005/109315, my Patent of the Month.

A camera stores images of what portions of the cash point should look like. At intervals fresh images are taken and compared with the reference image. If the image is different than the cash point is closed down and an alert is sent out. Different lighting conditions or the time of day are taken into account in the reference images.

The applicant is UTC Fire & Safety Corporation, a company based in Connecticut. The increased costs from such devices are, inevitably passed on to the consumer.

Another method is using biometrics, where data about the customer is monitored at the cash point. Fingerprints are the most favoured for inventions, though some use other aspects such as retinal scans or voice recognition. US 6424249 is an authentication system using all three which has been heavily cited by later patents. In June 2007, Barclays Bank and the NCR Corporation jointly announced that they were introducing the first biometric-enabled cash point in the United Arab Emirates. The struggle between criminals and counter-measures carries on.

Our Patent of the Month is provided courtesy of Steve Van Dulken from the British Library.  Steve is a patent specialist at the British Library and has his own blog at http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/patentsblog/

Steve has worked since 1987 as a patents librarian at the British Library. Author of Inventing the American Dream, Inventing the 19th century and Inventing the 20th century, both popular science, and of British patents of invention, 1617-1977: a guide for researchers and editor of Introduction to patents information.