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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 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.
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".
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.