An awareness video made by Inspector D Vishweswar and constable B. Kishore Kumar of the Warangal City Police, and tweeted by Warangal City Police Commissioner V. Ravinder on Saturday, talks about the latest cyber fraud known as ‘RFID card skimming’ fraud or ‘Card Not Present’ fraud
Hyderabad: Imagine a situation where an unknown person needs to just stand near you to steal vital information from your credit or debit card, and without you even knowing, loot money from your account.
An awareness video made by Inspector D Vishweswar and constable B. Kishore Kumar of the Warangal City Police, and tweeted by Warangal City Police Commissioner V. Ravinder on Saturday, talks about the latest cyber fraud known as ‘RFID card skimming’ fraud or ‘Card Not Present’ fraud.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) frauds are made possible by contactless payment technology, which allows transactions without physical contact between the card and the terminal, which could be a Point of Sale (POS) device or a Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled mobile, a PayPal RFID device, or any other device that has RFID chip readers.
The person with any of these devices needs to just scan your wallet or pocket, wherever your chip-enabled debit/credit card is, and they can have all your card data with them. Vishweswar and Kishore Kumar in fact demonstrate in the video, how a person using a RFID POS machine scans the jeans pocket of an unsuspecting person, where he apparently has his wallet, and in seconds, get a receipt of the transaction, even as the victim goes about his work unaware that cash has been debited from his account.
Spreading the word
According to Ravinder, though there have not yet been any complaints of RFID card frauds, the video was made to create awareness so that the public could be alert.
The video also talks about how to prevent such devices from stealing card information, though the RFID blocking sleeves and wallets are yet to be scientifically proven successes.
In Hyderabad, it was just a few days ago that two Romanians were nabbed for a similar fraud. They had installed card reading skimmers and micro-cameras in ATM kiosks to steal data. The skimmers were fastened near the card reader of the ATM to capture data from the magnetic strip on the back of a debit or credit card. The micro-cameras were used to record the PIN entered by customers, thus enabling the crooks to withdraw money using duplicate cards.
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