Malaysian: The greatest credit card fraudster in the world?

As we all know that Malaysia’s Credit card is not accepted by a lot of internet shopping portal and web money transfer service namely PayPal. This is because credit card fraud is rampant in our country. I don’t know whether we should be proud or ashame of this but apparently Malaysia’s credit card fraudsters are the best or to be more precise, “the most creative” in the world. On Sunday, News Strait Time (NST) published an article about a new method that our credit card fraudsters are using now.

According to report, the fraudsters nowadays are not merely professional criminal but also inventors. They are like the high-tech thieves we see in the movies. The fraudsters are now using two new devices to steal credit card number. These two devices are so new and rare that the police have not come out with a name for it. The first device is something akin to digital voice recorder (DVR). The fraudster use it to tap phone lines and another is to transfer the data via SMS,the police call it “”wire-tapping transmitter”.

This is how the devices work:” With the DVR, the fraudsters connect the device to the merchant’s telephone line, which sends data to the bank. So any transaction conducted by the merchant is copied by the DVR, which can run for nine hours. If you only have the DVR, someone will have to come and get the device to download the data to a computer. With the wire-tapping transmitter, no one has to collect the device. As it is SMS-ing the data to a phone, the fraudster could be relaxing on a beach somewhere getting all the data,” This new method can steal in between 100 to 1000 accounts daily, depending on the traffic rate.

Next time if you are thinking of paying with your credit card, please do check whether they have additional devices attached to the machine.