mumbai

Updated: Oct 05, 2017 09:58 IST

In a case of card cloning in Powai, a PhD student from IIT allegedly lost Rs59,000.

According to the Powai police, the 27-year-old student lodged a First Information Report (FIR) with them on September 22, saying that an unidentified accused used a cloned card to withdraw the amount from an ATM kiosk in Mumbai.

The complainant said he was in the library of his college when between 11.45pm on September 9 and 12.05 am on September 10, he received three messages informing him that money had been debited from his bank account using his ATM card.

According to the police, the victim checked his wallet and found his card in it. He then immediately called the bank to get his number blocked. In that time, the fraudster had managed to make one more transaction, taking it up to four and money lost to Rs59,000.

The victim received another notification SMS on his phone before he could block the card.

Last month. eight people, including four waiters from Mumbai, Thane and Pune were charge-sheeted for stealing data and cloning credit/debit cards of 1,026 customers from four districts, withdrawing well more than Rs 1 crore from it. The accused used to swipe the cards on skimmers, memorised the pin code of the customer while it was being typed.

Advocate Vicky Shah, a cyber expert said, “It needs to be found out if it’s a magnetic strip card or an EMV chip card. If it’s an EMV chip card ,it is very difficult to be cloned, making this a unique case. As a preventive measure, customers should replace their existing magnetic strip cards with an EMV chip card.”