Romania Mob Installs ATM Skimmers at Self-Checkouts
They’ve been crossing our northern border for months.
SECURE. THE. NORTH. BORDER.
This is why I do not ignore illegal crossing at the north border. The ones I’ve written about cover people tied to the Romanian mob.
Here are a few:
- Border Patrol Apprehends Romanians Linked to Organized Crime Crossing U.S.-Canada Border
- Biden Northern Border Crisis: New York Might Adjust Sanctuary Laws Due to Increase of Illegal Crossings
Now we know why the mob had people cross the border. I wish I caught this news earlier. Guess I need a new Google alert:
Debit card skimmers have long been problematic at gas stations and ATMs. Now a highly organized network of crooks is branching out.
“They’ll have people sitting outside a Walmart or a Target, and it looks like they’re panhandling,” prosecutors told Fox News Digital. “Sometimes they’ll have a couple of kids. And they are actually using Bluetooth technology that’s connected to the skimmers inside the stores. So it’s like a two for one, getting cash that people give them and stealing the numbers off the skimmers.”
Officials made major busts in December and January, but they believe the criminals have doubled down.
They think the criminals “could be raking in $9 million a month.”
In California…in January:
A suspect in Brea had $27,000 cash and 42 cloned cards.
During a search in Seal Beach, investigators uncovered more than 200 cloned cards and $14,000 stuffed in a suspect’s glove box. That suspect made repeated trips to a convenience store ATM to make illegal withdrawals, officials said.
The CalWORKs program provides cash aid to dependent families. It has been the frequent target of scammers and thieves and is drained of millions of dollars in fraud cases every year.
Although the crimes might not appear to be violent, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said these crimes leave many victims in their wake.
“The victims are single mothers struggling to put a roof over their children’s’ heads and food on the table and hardworking people who need a helping hand who find themselves standing at the checkout line with bags full of groceries only to be humiliated when they find that they have no money in their account because a thief has surreptitiously taken everything,” Spitzer said.
In San Jose, those connected to the Romanian mob target the elderly Asians and Indians.
Police say a group of men and women in a car or SUV will ask for directions, engage in a conversation and thank the victim – while slyly taking their jewelry and replacing it with fakes.
San Jose police also said Romanian organized criminal suspects have posed as general contractors, roofers or plumbers.
San Jose authorities arrested two men allegedly connected to the Romanian mob in November.
The policer found $13,000 dollars with them along with “three vehicles and evidence that may be linked to Facebook Marketplace scams, credit card skimming and money laundering.”
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Comments
Get those protected wallets and. NEVER stop for panhandlers
Those with the children have always been the worse
The money they are stealing is from the US taxpayer
Single moms, maybe birthcontrol is in order.
I’m all for a helping hand up , but this is a way of life for the “single” moms and the pan handlers.
There needs to be a limit. In Wisconsin, in the past anyway , don’t know what’s going on there now, they finally limited the child #to 2, no more money for 3 and dang if the numbers didn’t drop and the scammers from Chicago stopped coming
Yes, they were double dipping
My husbands business got caught with his employees filling up at certain gas stations, even with the special codes for the gas cards
It sometimes is God awful. The only positive is that each card can only be used 2 times a day
I encountered a non English speaking Latina recently that was panhandling with a poster that had pictures of a bambina and the words “Surgery…Please Help. God Bless”.
I tried to tell her panhandling is illegal in Columbia, SC but she no comprende.
Who made her poster?
There are scores of Flipper Zero threads at Reddit. Some links go to Russian websites. One poster said they operate at 13.57ghz. I’ve no idea if that’s correct. Seems Walmart etc. could easily set up a RF jammer.
Not legally.
Exactly correct. One of my ‘additional duties’ in the Army was frequency spectrum manager. Jamming any portion of the frequency spectrum is very high on the list of No No from the Federal Communications Commission. Bottom is ‘thou shalt not interfere with the communication spectrum’ b/c the FCC WILL take action against you. Big potential fines and jail time.
The problem is they aren’t scanning RFID off of you. They install special card readers in the self- check out kiosks inside the store that steal the card numbers and send them via Bluetooth to people that are nearby. Unless you notice the card reader is different somehow you have no way of knowing until the money is gone.
That’s why I pay with cash whenever possible.
A bit less cruel than maiming their own children and sending them out to beg.
They are teaching them a way of life, steal what is not yours
Gypsies gotta gypsy.
Puh-LEEEZE. That’s Romany,; Gypsy is racist you know. So is the word “gyp”.
I maintain that the letter “y” is racist. Is it a vowel or not? It certainly is being treated far worse than the other vowels.
“Y” is the first trans letter of the alphabet. We all know it: “A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.”
(Or, as family lore has it, a grandmother was one of six children, 5 of whom were girls. It went “Ada, Eda, Ida, Oda, Uda, and sometimes Uncle John.”)
Actually, “Y” is generally called a “semivowel.”
They are the garbage people of Europe.
It’s not say the state shouldn’t force the woman to name the “father”, they should, absolutely.
Men must be help at least financially responsible for a child.
Like they say, it takes 2 to tango
And childcare expenses aren’t even close when the father is found and wages often garnished.
I give credit to the mothers for not getting an abortion, and like I said, we need to give a hand up, just not make it a lifestyle choice.
At a minimum we need Mandatory DNA test prior to any claims of paternity. To include births in hospital to seemingly the perfect couple before the blank for the ‘Father’s Name’ is filled in. Same for any claims for child support from the ‘Father’ until DNA test proves it. End the presumption of paternity.
Some courts have already compelled bon-fathers to support children not their own.
Yep, due to ‘presumption’ in that they never contested the issue b/c they foolishly trusted their Wife/Partner who assured them they were the Father. I understand that some studies report up to 1/3 of instances where DNA/blood typing is done to check compatibility/match for an organ transplant to a child the results indicate the ‘Father’ is not the biological Father. Whether that is too high or too low one way to preclude it is a mandatory DNA/Paternity test before putting a ‘Father’s Name’ on the birth certificate.
It’s not just the “presumption” for a husband in spite of DNA testing or for a boyfriend that doesn’t think to contest paternity and ask for a DNA test in time. In several states, there’s also a pattern of sticking near strangers with child support without proper notification.
1. The welfare department pressures the mother to name _any_ man.
2. The court schedules a hearing and sends notice to an old address, without any effort to verify the address or find a current address.
3. The man doesn’t get the notice, so he doesn’t respond.
4. The court awards child support by default, solely because he doesn’t show up.
5. NOW they have no trouble finding him at his new address – and the court will not reconsider it’s award. It won’t order a DNA test, and it will ignore the results if the mother agrees to one.
6. (Anti)Social Services and the court collaborate on squeezing blood from a stone.
Romanian recipe for omelette:
First, steal two eggs.
I suspect there are actual Romanians – Latin-speaking Slavs from the former northeast of the Roman Empire, not wanderers from India that once adopted the name Romani along with “Egyptians” and any other alias that might fool someone into not locking everything up when they hear the wanderers are coming – that are very angry about those that conflate the two ethnic groups and make such jokes.
The device used is called a Flipper, and it is a white, rectangular device about the size of a candy bar with orange buttons. I have not figured out a way to block their WiFi signal but I have discovered that you can spot them lurking and chase them out of range by playing a 22 khz sine wave on your personal cellular device.
The Flipper Zero is not special and can only read your credit card at near contact range just like the credit card machine does.
The skimmers these guys use are a completely different beast. They are specially designed fascia that fit over the existing credit card machine that read your card and store the card information for retrieval or transmit it using Bluetooth, cell, Wi-Fi, or the like.
Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves … C’mon everyone, sing along!
This is reason enough alone to use Apple Pay or Google Pay whenever you can. It’s simply not possible to ‘skim’ contactless payments because not only is the data encrypted, but neither your card information nor your personal information is actually transmitted. Instead, digital tokens are what’s transmitted. Those tokens will only work one time. It’s too bad not many gas stations offer contactless payment. I’m not really sure why as skimmers LOVE to close those pump terminals. I’ve even seen them clone ATM terminals…and placed them at bank branches. You would really have to be paying attention to even notice.
Or just use cash. The more we use cash and the less dependent we are on cashless digital world the better off we will be IMO.
^^^This^^^
The only exchange of information I want in a transaction is this here for that there and Agreed? Good. Done? Bye.”
Anything more is shenanigans bait.
Same with tapping the card itself.
Some things never change. I had quite a few encounters with gypsies when i lived in Spain in the 70s. One time i was entering a metro station in Madrid. I was the first down the stairs and the gypsy at the bottom of the stairs didn’t notice me, but did hear the crowd coming down after me. She had a child in her lap and she gave him a good whack to get him crying. Better for business. Increases the sympathy factor.
Moved to the city of Salamanca a few months later. LOTS of gypsies there. I still chuckle at how they would try to sell people U.S. coins for pesetas. Still haven’t quite figured that out. Or the best one. More than once, a gypsy tried to sell me Queen Isabella’s ring. SMH.
And in Salamanca every Saturday morning, the gypsies would go to the city’s glorious Plaza Mayor to pay tribute to the “King of the Gypsies”. Something to see.
Yup. Nothing has changed.
We had a family of Gypsies in our little town of Bennettsville, SC in the 1970s. They had dark skin with dark wavy hair and went by “McGill” which struck me as odd.
They didn’t look Scottish.
Kid I know on a training cruise stopped in a Spanish port. Liberty!
The chief of the boat confiscated all the cool glowing wrist bands, enthusiastic tourist greeters were handing out by the dock. Then give the crew hell.
They didn’t get it until he took one apart, showing the tracker chip in it.
Telling his tale, the kid said: “That seems weird, but why.” So, I explained ways to use it until he told me to stop. He seems to have gotten the real messages: information leakage is just bad, and sailors on leave have been targets since before there were boats.
I’ve never heard of that before. Was this a personal security threat or military related?
Romanian?
Is that the new PC term for Romani?
Which was the old PC term for gypsy?
Seriously, are they “travelers” or are they just Eastern Europeans from the country of Romania? NOT the same thing.
There are ‘travelers” whose families have been residents (if sometimes not citizens) for generations in most of the European countries – granted a lot less than before WWII. These particular ones may well have come from Ireland FGS.
Being all PC and refusing to identify perps in the news as what they themselves self identify as is BS.
Is Senator Menendez getting a cut?
I think the headline should either be “Romani” or “Romanian” depending on whether you’re addressing gypsies or people from the former Warsaw Pact nation. But “Romania mob” is wrong either way.
My wallet has RF protection and it works because I can’t tap my card anyplace without removing it from the wallet first. Sad that it’s come to this, and criminals will always find a way, but at least there is a solution to this particular scam that isn’t too expensive.
RF-blocking wallets are standard, and carry your passport in an RF-screening case.
I had to explain to an engineer colleague who works in defense making RF great why that little “secure plug-in” USB dongle was a thing. No, don’t plug into those “courtesy” USB charging sockets built into wall outlets. (That dongle sounded like merely a power-only pass-through of lines in the socket. If we’re getting serious, I’d like a bit more.)
Air gaps are your friend. A Faraday cage is better.
The skimmers are secretly attached to the credit card machines — exactly when you’ll have your card out of your wallet.
Avoid using any card reader that uses a swipe of the magnetic strip….skimming the data off the strip is trivial. The readers that use the chip and require the card to be inserted are less prone to fraud, and the NFC readers are the least prone to fraud.
I have heard that Apple Pay is immune to skimming because it generates a temporary credit card number every time it is used.
That is more of a function of how tap cards work. Apple pay basically turns your phone into a tap to pay credit card. The same thing with Google pay and with Samsung pay. So, a tap to pay card will work just as well as one of the telephone-based payment systems.
Correct, this is the Near-Field-Communication (NFC) tech that I referenced in my post above
Well, “Immune to particular skimming techniques.”, or their analog, with different transmission tech.
Useful to think in terms of vulnerabilities, exploits, and attack surface. Magnetic stripes give up their too-much content to any swiper — vulnerability. So, be the swiper — exploit. Or intercept the info anywhere it goes — another exploit. Etc.
The attack surface of swiped cards is pretty small — one specified “swipe” action, and they’re otherwise pretty hard to interact with. Hard to read them surreptitiously at a distance, for example.
Other techs, like chip cards, or no-contact NFC have different attack surfaces — protocol sets for chip data access, or protocol for the radio link, then the chip data access. The raw data like bare account number is wrapped with some tech and ritual with these others.
The most accessible entry point I know to this stuff is Bruce Schneier. He’s credited with coining “security theater.”
I’m also a fan of Computer Related Risks, which was a newsgroup, generated a book and a web site, and may still be going on — haven’t looked in a while.
Another point to consider related to this… there are many consumer protections built into Credit Cards that are not necessarily present when using a Debit Card. Federal law regulates these consumer protections. The most basic one is that you have 30 days to report fraudulent activity on a Credit Card and the card issuer must investigate the incident and can’t charge you while that investigation is underway. I simply won’t use a debit card for anything other than ATM access.
Excellent point about the greater protection offered to a consumer on a Credit vs debit card.
Alternatively, hacked credit cards can run up transactions up to the credit limit. Prepayed debit cards these days update account balance in near-real time, and just decline paying out, with no fee.
Good to just assume there is no one vulnerability, one exploit, or one consequence. Informed people will land on different protocols that fit best for each of them. I, myself, use a prepaid debit card with the absolute minimum PII for all online transactions, decline to attach it to any other account (like PayPal likes to do), and retire that card from time to time.
Bonus, I don’t think I want transactions and an account flying around electronically — that’s all of them — attached to the dossier they assemble to extend you credit.(*) Bonus, bonus: when there’s a “data breach” somewhere That Can Never Happen(tm), dumping the card and account is easy.
(*) Yes, I know “they” can connect all the things through their prerogatives for
combatting the drug warfighting terrorismmaking the world safe for democracy, surveilling people on the sly because they like to. Can I rather have people driven by basic greed and perversion, or just ego — those people you can bargain with.)You ever read the Repairman Jack books by F. Paul Wilson?
“Police say a group of men and women in a car or SUV will ask for directions, engage in a conversation and thank the victim – while slyly taking their jewelry and replacing it with fakes.”
This sounds unlikely. No matter how deft they are at taking what you have off you and putting something else back on you, they can’t just happen to have the right thing with them to replace your item with.