-
Man using credit card - Source: ONE News -
Related
As banks scramble to replace thousands of credit cards which have had their details "skimmed" at car park pay machines, investigators say they have no doubt the theft is the work of Eastern European crime gangs.
Westpac Bank and the Auckland City Council is looking into how the credit card details were stolen from the 1970-space council-owned Downtown car park over a period of months.
It had all the hallmarks of a Russian or Albanian hacking ring preying on soft targets, a source close to the investigation told the New Zealand Herald newspaper.
The gang was believed to be based in the United States, but probably masked its identity by using internet addresses in other countries.
Several victims of the fraud reported their credit cards had been used at a Walmart chain store in Phoenix, Arizona.
Police National electronic crime laboratory manager Maarten Kleintjes told the newspaper he had no doubt the car park scam was carried out by organised crime.
"I would guess they would come from the Eastern European countries, that's where they all come from," he said.
Members of crime groups came to New Zealand to attach skimming devices to ATM machines and send credit card details back to their bosses overseas.
But a Herald source believed the gang used a more sophisticated form of credit card theft, called spoofing, in which criminals forge an internet address to conceal their identity and sniff the internet for targets they can break into and steal information.
Police spokeswoman Kaye Calder said New Zealand representatives of Interpol and fraud staff at police national headquarters had not been advised of the scam.
New Zealand banks and credit card companies Mastercard and Visa have refused to reveal the scale of the problem.
However, it was believed that more than 100,000 affected cards are having to be urgently replaced.
