Yet another cloned card
I’m bored and I feel like ranting.
An officer of one of the banks with which I have a credit card account called me this morning and asked if I was in Penang. I wasn’t. He proceeded to ask me if I had purchased petrol at an Esso station recently. I haven’t, in fact I have not stepped into an Esso station in the last two years. If you are a Malaysian credit card holder, you can probably guess where the rest of the conversation headed - my credit card had been cloned.
Now… in the four years that I had been living in the UK, where I had used credit cards for almost all my shopping, including the tiniest purchases and online shopping, not once did I encounter a case of misuse or fraudulent transactions in my accounts. Contrast this with the last two and a half years that I have been back in Malaysia, I have been inflicted not once, not twice, not thrice but FOUR times with such cases of cloning. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Malaysians are notorious worldwide for suspected involvement in credit card fraud and not a few have been caught.
Fortunately for me, in every incident bar one, the banks very good in resolving the matter. Nevetheless, it’s a huge pain in the ass and a bloody nuisance to have to the credit card in question put out of commission while a replacement is made. The inconvenience is made worse if I have direct debit transactions linked to it. What’s even more infuriating in this particular case is that this is a brand new card (I’ve had it for less than a month!) and that I’ve hardly used it. On the other hand, that means I can narrow my suspects down to: Starbucks, KLCC or Tower Records, 1Utama. That or an inside job!
Posted on January 23rd, 2004 by jl
Filed under: My Malaysia
either it’s the inside’s job, their fault of improper disposing of your credit card’s carbon copied statement, a bad luck that someone generated your number, someone just peeked into your wallet or your fault for disposing your carbon copy wrongly.
I don’t ever throw away credit card slips. They’re filed away by date! *gasp*
sorry, i don’t know how exposed you are to banking operations… but here’s a tip… check before u sign the bills whether the invoice/receipt displays the full 16 digits of ur credit card… most of the time i know retailers who use SBB or MBB display all-16 digits completely which is how cloning can be done with the inside job part…
the whole process begins with banks setting up channels with retailers where e.g. u use a citibank card.. but the machine @ the retailer is with SBB, the process is pretty simple coz its juz digital information transferring all over the place around the world in less than a couple of seconds.. but the bad part is whether the machine is “bugged” or the receipt printed prints out completely all 16 digits…
“bugged” machines usually mean some fraudsters has already set up a digital infra-red/bluetooth system inside the machine to digitally transfer the credit card numbers to their e.g. PDA where they can proceed to use machines n start printing n embossing…
in case of receipts with 16 digits, well can’t really help u there.. juz be careful where u use ur card… citibank is pretty good coz they have tighter security… SCB (stanchart sucks usually), n local banks have horrible security systems (coz all of them uses legacy system which is pretty much easy to crack if u know the codings)
but the real reason why you dont really have much problem using credit cards in UK is bcoz the credit cards cloned there are brought over to Asia to be used… likewise Malaysian credit cards being used in Thailand/China…
so my advice would be… set up ur direct debit links with current/savings account with local banks (e.g. Maybank’s i-Account - they’ve got pretty cool terms & conditions but u gotta play ur cards right to benefit urself) coz the chip-based tech is pretty much “un-hackable” at the moment…
for credit cards? juz take a Visa/ Mastercard & an American Express if u like (coz Amex is the top-dog in security for credit terms) but Visa & Master ur better off using citibank =)
hope tht helps….