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Criminals Use 3D-Printed Skimming Devices On Sydney ATMs
AlbanX writes "A gang of suspected Romanian criminals is using 3D printers and computer-aided design (CAD) to manufacture 'sophisticated' ATM skimming devices to fleece Sydney residents. One Romanian national has been charged by NSW Police. The state police found one gang that had allegedly targeted 15 ATMs across metropolitan Sydney, affecting tens of thousands of people and nabbing around $100,000."
I hope the police gets'em.
I would have liked them to consider the damage they're doing to the rest of us hard working and law abiding people in the eyes of the rest of the world..
not sure how this affected tens of thousands of people... seems like a stretch to me... it affected 5 bank employees and 1 insurance company...
It's about time that US banks caught up with the rest of the world and put chips on all their cards, then we can finally get rid of the magstripes.
While chip&pin has it's security flaws it's way better than the 20 year old magnetic stripe system, in Australia and most of Europe the only reason they still put the stripes on cards is because the cards have to work when people travel to the US.
It's been at least a year since I've seen a reader without chip support in Australia and the only time the magstrip is used is when the chip or contactless read fails.
Sometimes it's funny how ATMs I see outside of my country (Spain) don't seem to have the security systems that they were forced to use here for problems like the one described in the article.
I also find foreign paper currency to be unsafe, ID documents too easy to forge and store security to be amazingly weak.
Sometimes I wish I lived in one of those countries where all that security isn't needed.
I read stories like this that try to diss the use of "3D Printers" as if somehow banning the use of those devices is somehow going to stop criminals from engaging in acts like this. What utter nonsense.
How many other stories about ATM skimmers emphasized any of the tools used to make the devices used to make their devices? Why such a strong emphasis on the 3D printing technology? It sounds like a cool buzz word, but means absolutely nothing other than an attempt to make something new sound frightening because the reporters and police officers involved don't have a clue about how the technology works.... therefore it must be some kind of dark magic that must be brought before the Inquisition and those involved banished to Hell (or some equivalent).
While I don't mind seeing stories like this on Slashdot as it does talk about emerging technologies and their impact upon society as a whole, it still turns my stomach to see such awful reporting overemphasizing the manufacturing technology (it was the lead paragraph) instead of describing what people were doing first. Had the technology being used been mentioned much further into the article, I think it would have been much more appropriate.
That they used 3D printing device, is hardly interesting news. That’s just more 3D printing hype. What I find fascinating with this story, is that card skimming at ATM still works, today, in 2013.
It’s clearly a failure to implement the most basic security and authentication features, which are widely available today. How can it be that, today, one can still do any kind of transaction with only a card number and a pin – if a pin is needed at all (eg. For online transactions).
They (the banks and/or credit card companies) try a lot of fancy things like nice holograms on ATM machines or abstruse authentication methods that fail to understand that a simple password is about as safe as the card number itself. This PIN skimming thing is the proof of that.
It’s slowly getting better, with unique number generators for validation or unique numbers sent through SMS. But I hardly believe these solutions are optimal for the users. Perhaps this explains why their implementation is so amazing slow – although I believe it still better to have those as none at all.
As you have pointed out, European 'Chip-and-PIN' Cash-Card Security have already been cracked by criminals.
And fair enough, generally cards with chips are still more secure than their magnetic counterparts.
What I am more disturbed about is, from the point of the consumer, it appears that in Europe at least the supposed security of the chip and pin system have been (ab)used by banks to deny refunds to their defrauded clients.
From the POV of the consumer, I would not favor the use of this newer, more secure system if it shifts the burden of fraud on me with the excuse that "it's unhackable, you must have given them your PIN".
Just FYI: whenever you read "Romanian" in the news regarding crime, and it's not related to the country of Romania, it actually means "gypsy"
And Australians wrestle crocodiles wearing Akubra hats and go "Cor!"
in an elephant's world.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That would be somewhat more likely if this were a story about petty crime like pickpocketing or car theft (but even there, some amount of ethnic Romanian immigrants are perfectly capable of engaging in petty crime). But when it comes to crime involving computer exploits, they are considerably more likely to be ethnic Romanian and not Roma. For example, this Wired article about online theft involves a number of young people who are not Roma .
Living in Romania myself and seeing it treated like a pariah abroad in spite of the fact that some parts of it are among the best educated and cultured parts of Europe, I am used to the tendency of many to blame the country's ills on the Roma, but good and evil is inside of everyone ethnicity.
This "Romanians = gypsies = criminals" connection is also dangerous one, as it can really mislead people about moving populations in Europe. I spend a lot of time in Finland, and I watched as one community lamented a large Roma tribe that flooded their town each summer, begging, pickpocketing and recycling. They called them "the Romanians" and that formed everyone's opinion about the country. When I tried to start a conversation with one of them in a queue at a supermarket's bottle-return machine, it turned out all of them were from a small town in central Bulgaria. But for some reason, Bulgaria never gets rubbished half as much as Romania.
Why not use the camera tech already in the ATM to detect when the ATM is being screwed with, and automatically shut it down, and flag someone to come out and FIX it.
If the assholes never make money this way, they'll stop trying to do it. This is simply a novel security hole that needs to be plugged. OR... make it so if you pull the cover off an ATM without properly disarming it (which you could only do if you were an authorized maintenance person) it shocks the living fuck out of you.
That might also dissuade crooks... speaking of which, I've always kind of wondered, while we're on the topic, you know how banks put those dye things into bags of money so when the crooks leave the bank, they rupture and spray dye all over the cash (marking it) and hopefully the crooks too? Why not use a Thermite grenade instead? Give the bastards something more to think about than, "what are you gonna do with YOUR share of the loot, Lou?"
How long will it take for someone to suggest giving everyone an account linked to their biometric info, and just eliminate cash outright? People may scream about their privacy, but as we've seen, people are perfectly willing to sacrifice privacy for convenience, just as they trade liberty for "security" (which is a fool's bargain if ever there were one, since once the state takes all necessary measures to protect you from the "terrorists", who the hell protects you from the government?
As for me, I stopped using ATM's a long time ago. I take what I need from the INSIDE of the bank each month in cash, and secret it at home. It's never enough to worry excessively about a break-in, (we're not talking thousands, or tens of thousands, more like a few hundred,) and just use THAT as my ATM. No fees, no PIN, no skimming or scamming or any of that other nonsense... ATM's suck anyway, even without all the different ways you can or DO get robbed using them, so why do it?
But I digress. Your move, naysayers.
Use a 3D printer to print a blade/saw to cut the criminals hands off
Too brutal? Smarter might be special laws for foreigners coming for the open season on consumers and the slap on the wrist if they are caught.
More appropriate to have it make something t o make their stay at the countryclub jail more enjoyable , then???
Scientology!
interesting geographic lesson there, chucklehead
It would also be more likely if the person arrested wasn't described as a "Romanian national" by both the summary and the article.
Romania, a poor country in eastern Europe.
It depends what you mean by "poor". Being an Eastern European country it's definitely not rich, thanks to the wonderful influence the old USSR used to maintain in the region. But poor it is not, it's just on par with the other countries in the region, such as Hungary or Serbia. And it's an EU member, after all. Have you ever been there?
And no, Alaska is not an island, check your dummy geographic terminology. :-)
It's actually kinda understandable. Romania is finnish for Romania, Romani is finnish for stealing gypsies. We also have home born ones. They are all Romanis no matter where they are actually from. We do understand they come from different countries, and wish they didn't. We also blame the countries they come from for not taking care of them, so they wouldn't have to come. Also, what you are calling begging we call fucking annoying. We don't have beggars, we already pay them collectively to stay inside and watch tv or drink themselves to dead. What you call pickpocketing we also call pickpocketing. We also call our politicians fucking morons for not letting us deal with those pickpockets in a way the civilized world would feel is brutal. What you call recycling we call stealing in most cases. Some bottles are ok, but they have recycled metals from our roofs, and bikes from bike racks. They also recycle all kinds of tools and materials from construction sites. Might sound racists, but 90% of their race gives the remaining 10% a bad name. If it were up to me i'd make it legal to shoot every last of them at the border.
Still, what is the relevance of this? Why is the criminal's ethnicity relevant at all? Are you saying that other nationalities are free from crime? Moreover, they operated in the distant Australia, so they must have had connections to the local criminal groups, too. As far as I know, 3D printers are not popular in Romania (I doubt they are even for sale there, and anyway, why carry one overseas?), therefore it must have been a "joint venture" of Australian, Romanian and possibly other foreign criminals.
But again, why is this relevant? They are criminals regardless of their origins, and criminals usually have a way of getting together when they need to.
So, you draw conclusions about an entire nation after analyzing a sample of one? Who's the racist here?
Whenever someone is non-Anglo saxon and does something wrong we mention their race to assert our moral superiority over them.
ZOMG!!!
Printed guns AND now fraud devices !!
These 3d printer tings needs to be banned immediately.
We don't have beggars, we already pay them collectively to stay inside and watch tv or drink themselves to dead.
And this is where you fail, because you do not understand that we all live on the same planet. As long as you take care of your citizens and say fuck you to the rest of the world, this will keep happening. If you're so wonderful, why not help your neighbors improve? Otherwise some turtle beneath you will move eventually and you will end up in the mud.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Romainians are NOT Gypsies. The Roma people are the peoples called Gypsies who originated from India.
Are you saying that other nationalities are free from crime?
No, I believe it only says that some nationalities are significantly more prone to be criminal. And also that the press tries its best to conceal and pervert this fact.
Sorry, but "Romanian" as a label of national origin (which is how it is used most of the time outside of Romania) encompasses both ethnic Romanians and ethnic Roma/Saxons/Hungarians/Banat Bulgarians/Dobrogean Tatars and whoever else was born in the country. Trying to claim that Roma are not Romanians when the word is used in that sense shows a great misunderstanding of how English works.
Wait, the point I was trying to make is that not all Romanians are Gypsies otherwise known as Roma people, a subgroup of the Romani people. I never claimed anything. I merely pointed out Gypsies are Roma peoples. Maybe I needed to spell that out better.
In many parts of the world it is often mistaken that Roma = Romanians, meaning all Romanians are mistaken for Gypsies.
Newsflash
Criminals use 2D printers to create 'sophisticated' forged documents. Ban evil 2D printers!!!
WTFC's? Criminals have used lathes, presses, drills, hammers, laptops, PC's, all sorts of tools in the past! So, they use another tool, in this case the dastardly 3D Printer! OOOHH! Who really cares???
Some authors at /. absolutely cream themselves at the mere mention of a 3D Printer. Get over it already. They've been around awhile. Why the recent interest? Yeah, what I thought, a corporate sales scheme has infiltrated /. once again.
3D Printer! 3D Printer! 3D Printer! 3D Printer! 3D Printer! There... hope I just made your day.
Education is free in Romania. If the gypsies don't want to change, they will not change. Keeping your younglings in school it's a parent's basic duty. But nobody can enforce that to them. I think that, eventualy, Europe will get used to them. As far as I'm concerned, I don't think they will ever change their stupid ways. Tradition needs to be rethinked when it starts to brake the law. At least the law can be enforced. Crime has no ethnicity.
i thought debit cards in Australia have microchips? or only cards issued in Europe?
ATMs ought to display a picture of what they are 'supposed' to look like. Might help fight the assholes with the skimmers.
Unmistakeable sign of a failed western civilization:
truth == flamebait
If the gypsies don't want to change, they will not change.
Prejudice is ugly no matter who tries it on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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