More than 20 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) within the Kozhikode city limits do not have anti-skimming facility, making them vulnerable to fraud. This came to light during a quick security audit conducted by the police with the support of the district-level bankers’ committee in the wake of a recent series of suspicious ATM card skimming cases.
The police say majority of the third generation ATMs, now fully functional in various parts of the city, belong to a national bank that claims an annual cash transaction of ₹13 crore through its ATM kiosks in India alone. The situation continues even after several such attempts of thefts at the poorly guarded ATMs and lockers of the same bank in which some of the retired police officers too are victims.
Assistant Commissioner (South) K.P. Abdul Razak says the nationalised bank responsible for the negligence has been asked to set right the security flaws and provisionally strengthen the surveillance measures at all possible levels to address customers’ concerns. There were three incidents in which card skimmers were used in third generation ATM counters to unlawfully withdraw money by unidentified persons.
'Easy and cheap'
“Installation of advanced skimming protection is an easy task and also less expensive if the banks take the issue seriously. It can be easily fitted into the card-reading slot of the ATM machine to foil the trickery,” says Mr. Razak. All the new generation ATMs have this facility, but the third generation ATMs continue to be risky ones, he points out.
Technicians in the industry say the illegal copying of information from the magnetic stripe of an ATM debit card, credit card or cash card is a very easy task with the simple skimming method. In most of the cases, a dummy card reader is attached to the machine’s original slot besides an ATM keypad overlay or a mini camera to track the PIN. The fraud takes place at the moment they remove the skimming devices from the ATM and capture the data into a blank card for illegal account takeover.
The special police squad has identified the main suspects in the three cases after examining CCTV camera visuals.
