Are you withdrawing money from an ATM? This is something you need to know
The ATM is the object of desire of many fraudsters. Especially during the holidays, such activities intensify. The trick with the paper and sticker reaps its harvest, as every year.
Stealing money from an account
Holidays are a special time when we can observe a real display of thieves’ creativity. Tourists who want to withdraw cash from ATMs are an extremely tasty morsel. And where is the best place to launch an attack on an unsuspecting person who wants to withdraw cash? Of course, ATM. Thieves have already found many ways to strip our accounts of money. The more schemes we know, the better for us. Most often, it happens that the card is sucked in and the ATM does not return it. It’s not necessarily a fault with the ATM, sometimes it’s a deliberate action by fraudsters. To do this, they block the machine with a piece of paper.
Tricks with a pulled card and sticker
If an ATM “swallows” your card, it doesn’t have to be a malfunction. It could just as well be a carefully prepared fraud. The District Police Headquarters in Będzin has on its website, a complete list of methods used by fraudsters in the case of ATMs. The card swipe method is a simple trick that fraudsters perform using a piece of paper that blocks the card slot. This “fashion” came to us from France and is one of the cheapest and most trivial tricks. Hence, it is still often used. Let us recall a famous case when a certain Frenchman turned out to be a record holder and lost the equivalent of almost 47 thousand zlotys in this way.
The fraudsters are able to block the card so that it is stuck in the machine for good. But that’s not all, they first place it on the ATM a sticker with false service details. They count on the panicked customer to quickly call for help and, as a result, connect with the thief. And this, unfortunately, happens in most of these types of cases.
The fake service technician asks the injured party for complete personal information and card details. At the end there is a promise that the card will be returned to the customer within a certain time and he should wait for the letter.
How to avoid this type of fraud?
The only thing that will save us is contact with the bankinstead of calling the ATM service center. You should immediately block card. Even if a thief takes it out, there’s not much he can do with it. The bank’s number is best found on the official website or in the app. Let’s also remember that technical service technicians never ask for personal data and the card’s PIN over the phone.
See: ATM Method: Put in regular paper, take out cash
See: He blew up ATMs in Germany. He came back to Poland and did the same thing
