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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."
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.
People should not lose any money when their cards get skimmed... However, when you find out, and contact your bank, they will immediately block your card, meaning that your access to cash is a little more difficult. Also, it may take several days until you get your money back. It's not the end of the world, but it surely is inconvenient. And therefore, people are affected too.
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.