PIN Code Hackers Rip Off Moscow

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

http://www.sptimes.ru/current/pin.htm

Friday, October 22, 1999

PIN Code Hackers Rip Off Moscow

By Brian Humphreys
STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW - Hundreds of expatriates have received letters from their banks
abroad warning them that their bank cards have been compromised by someone
able to steal PIN codes through Moscow's ATM machines - and according to
card payment system officials, the theft of PIN codes now underway in
Russia is occurring on an unheard-of scale.

"There has been a compromise of cardholder details ... [that] appears to
involve Moscow ATMs," Peter Warner, director of Europay's anti-fraud
department, said. Europay is the leading card payment company in Europe,
which manages the MasterCard brand, as well as the Eurocheck, Cirrus and
Maestro systems.

"It is not immediately clear how the compromise occurred," he added. "We
are aware of a number of possible ways, all of which would require a
number of people to be working together."

Warner said that the problem appears to be isolated to Moscow and that St.
Petersburg ATMs have so far not been targeted. "We did not have any
problems in St. Petersburg at all," he said. "You can rest assured that
people in St. Petersburg will not experience this problem."

Russian and German law enforcement agencies are conducting a joint
investigation into what is believed to be a single crime ring that is
somehow - it is not clear how - hacking into communications between an ATM
user and his or her host bank, according to Warner and to German banking
officials.Warner said this Russian-German investigation is nearing a
conclusion, and that "we will know very shortly" who is behind the fraud.

The sister paper of The St. Petersburg Times, The Moscow Times, broke the
news three weeks ago that people who use their bank cards in automatic
teller machines in Moscow had begun to fall victim to criminals able to
access their accounts - and pillage them, sometimes down to the last
Deutsche mark or dollar - at other ATMs around the world, from Tel Aviv to
Stockholm.

Since then, the amount of known victims of this fraud has escalated from a
handful to possibly hundreds. But this is the first time foreign bank
officials and foreign and Russian card companies have acknowledged the
problem.

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