Last week I posted about a guy who came across a well-made skimmer at an ATM in Vienna. I wondered who made such a fine looking piece of sociopathic hardware. Turns out this company sells such devices in bulk via Alibaba. — Read the rest

Ben Tedesco of the cybersecurity company Carbon Black found an ATM skimmer while he was on vacation in Vienna, Austria.

A skimmer is a card reader that fits over an ATM card slot. It scans and records the information on the magnetic strip. — Read the rest

NCR reports in-the-wild sightings of "deep skimmers" (tiny, disposable card-skimmers that run on watch batteries and use crude radios to transmit to a nearby base-station) on ATMs around the world: "Greece, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Bulgaria, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States."

Brian Krebs, who has written many excellent investigative pieces on ATM skimmers, spent several hours watching footage seized from hidden skimmer cameras, and has concluded that covering your hand while you enter your PIN really works in many cases — and that many people don't bother to take this elementary step. — Read the rest

Police in an unidentified European nation have retrieved wafer-thin ATM skimmers that are so small that they can be fitted inside the credit-card insertion slot. Brian Krebs describes the finding:

That's according to two recent reports from the European ATM Security Team (EAST), an organization that collects ATM fraud reports from countries in the region.

If the previous ATM skimmer posts didn't scare the pants off you, this one from San Fernando Valley, which Brian Krebs reports on, might. It has a near-undetectable pinhole camera for recording timestamped footage of your PIN entry, and apart from that indicator, the only way to spot it is to yank hard on the front of the ATM before you start using it. — Read the rest

Much-loved fantasy and science fiction author Diane Duane has had a lot of bad luck lately, but this takes the cake: her ATM card was skimmed and the joint account she and her husband share has been zeroed out, and she has no money left at all to cover daily bills while her bank tries to sort out the mess and restore her balance, which could take a long time. — Read the rest

This ATM skimmer was retrieved from a Chase ATM in West Hills, CA, and it appears to have been 3D printed. It is very sophisticated, with "true geek factor."

On the bottom of the fake card acceptance slot is a tiny hole for a built-in spy camera that is connected to a battery.

Last February, i.materialise reported that they'd declined an offer to 3D print a new fascia for an ATM, because they suspected it was part of an ATM skimmer (a device used to capture peoples' ATM PINs and card numbers). The news may have inspired another ATM skimmer gang, four men from South Texas who were indicted in June. — Read the rest

Last June, Belgian 3D printing shop i.materialise received (and declined) its first order for a custom, 3D-printed ATM skimmer faceplate. Good on the i.materialisers, but get set for a lot more of this sort of thing, as more of us end up with our own 3D printers that produce parts on demand, without any nose service bureau to tell us that committing bank fraud is an inappropriate technological choice. — Read the rest

Brian Krebs reports on a new wrinkle in ATM skimmer design: if the ATM is in its own lobby, crooks can steal your card number and PIN without ever touching the ATM. Instead, they attach the skimmer to the door-lock (you know those doors that only open if you swipe your card?) — Read the rest

Brian Krebs continues his excellent series of posts on ATM skimmers, this time with a report on the state of the art in commercially available artisan-crafted skimmers that can be bought through the criminal underground (accept no imitations!):

Generally, these custom-made devices are not cheap, and you won't find images of them plastered all over the Web.

Brian Krebs continues to scare the pants off of me with his ongoing series on sophisticated ATM skimmers (devices that capture your card number, working with a hidden camera to catch your PIN). His slideshow of next-gen skimmers has me convinced that there's no way I'd notice a skimmer on an ATM that I was using: "According to Doten, the U.S. — Read the rest

Brian Krebs's "Krebs on Security" features an ATM skimmer that is chillingly well-camouflaged. After seeing photos of early, crude skimmers — devices that capture your card number and work in concert with a hidden camera that records you punching in your PIN — I assumed that I could rely on my own powers of observation to keep from falling victim to one. — Read the rest

Before duping his 142,000 Republican voters in New York, GOP trickster George Santos pulled a fast one on a Seattle judge. In 2017, during a bail hearing to help out his "family friend" from Brazil — an ATM skimmer who later pleaded guilty to fraud — the Congress imposter boldly fabricated his place of employment, telling the judge, "I am an aspiring politician and I work for Goldman Sachs," according to audio obtained by Politico (listen below, posted by RAP). — Read the rest

Brian Krebs has published an ad from "Foreign Agents," a notorious Russian crime service. They're advertising the availability of foot soldiers in the USA who can help cash out hacked bank accounts and credit cards. Unlike traditional bank-fraud mules, who don't know that they're part of a scam, these "associates" are "неразводные" ("nerazvodni" or "not deceived"). — Read the rest

People are posting photos of their debit and credit cards on Twitter. Some of them are lightly blurred– such as the one above which has a fake tilt shift effect added to it –but most are just straight photos of the cards with all the information unobscured. — Read the rest

Public Knowledge — whose white paper on the law and 3D printing is required reading — is throwing a conference in DC for wonks, policymakers, regulators, staffers and all manner of Hill rat. The event's on April 28, and it's free:

On April 28th at 3Dâš¡DC, the 3D printing community will descend on Washington, DC to show policymakers what they are up to.

ATM crooks in San Francisco have a clever trick: they glue down the ENTER, CANCEL and CLEAR buttons on an ATM, and wait for customers to go into the bank to complain. The fraudsters then complete the transaction using the on-screen equivalents — the victim having already keyed in a PIN — and skip away before the victim comes back out. — Read the rest

When a Thingiverse contributor uploaded 3D-print-ready homebrew tiles for German superboardgame Settlers of Catan, it raised a bunch of interesting legal questions. Is it illegal to make your own Settlers tiles? To download 3D files describing these tiles? To host the files? — Read the rest