Local commercial banks are stepping up to install the latest technology to prevent and reduce Automatic Bank Machine (ABM) fraud.
In an interview yesterday, chief executive officer of Massy Technologies InfoCom, David Belgrave, said there were a host of technologies available “that are well developed and are applied in many parts of the world.”
He did not want to disclose details of the high tech gadgets or systems that could be put in place.
“There are quite a few preventative technologies in place and operational habits that customers can use to protect themselves,” Belgrave said.
Admitting fraud was a global industry, Belgrave said fraudsters would always look at ways and means to get around even the latest technology.
Another expert in the field of technology to prevent fraud, who wished not to be identified, referred to the American ABM manufacturer, Diebold, which developed technology that it said would stop credit or debit card skimming which was the most common type of ABM fraud.
“It is a bank card in which the customer will have to rotate their cards in an angle where their cards are inserted in the machine on the long edge, instead of the short edge, as customary for years,” the expert said.
This latest technology is known as the ActivEdge card reader, according to an international media reports.
“While skimmers use the motion of inserting and removing the card to steal the information on the magnetic stripe, ActivEdge uses a moving head inside the machine to access that data,” the NBC Business report stated.
According to the article, Al Pascual, a fraud and security analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, said he thought the new reader would deter most criminals.
He was quoted as saying: “By changing the orientation that cards are fed into an ATM, this solution will render current external skimmers useless.”
On Monday, head of the Fraud Squad, Sr Supt Totaram Dookhie, confirmed that there had been an increase in bank fraud cases over the past months. He did not provide any statistics to support his claim.
His statement follows a recent report, where a woman, a customer of a commercial bank, found that just over $11,000 mysteriously disappeared from her account.
The woman reported that she left T&T on a vacation trip to Miami on July 14 and last used her bank card (Linx card) at one of the duty-free stores at Piarco International Airport.