In the ongoing battle between tech-savvy thieves and the banks that seek to thwart them, the bad guys got away with at least $60,000 from a Montgomery County cash machine using a technique known as skimming.
The investigation into the skimming — a wide-reaching term used to describe the theft of automatic teller machine account information — began Saturday, when a 42-year-old Rockville man discovered the light cover to a Bank of America ATM lying on a counter with a small camera taped inside.
Police believe the camera, while sitting above the machine at 11800 Rockville Pike in Bethesda, recorded customers entering their personal identification numbers, and a separate device attached to the card reader swiped the remaining account information from the magnetic strip on the ATM card’s back.
Detectives have determined that the devices were in place between 2 and 6:21 p.m. Saturday and do not believe other ATMs in the county were targeted.
Federal law requires the financial institution that issued an ATM customer’s card to cover any losses due to fraud that is reported in a timely manner, and a Bank of America spokeswoman said the bank was working closely with law enforcement to help solve this latest crime.
Forms of skimming have been around almost as long as there have been ATMs, experts said, and well-funded — a skimming device can cost about $3,000 — and creative thieves have been quick to adjust to the measures financial institutions and government agencies have put in place to stop them.
In 2002, after a series of skimming schemes made national headlines and the government began to fret over terrorist connections to the easily grabbed cash, Kurt Helwig and his Fairfax-based Electronic Funds Transfer Association brought together the Secret Service and finance bigwigs to tackle the problem.
Since then, Helwig said, the industry has come up with better programming and hardware, including improved tracking methods that seek out fraudulent charges.
The scams account for less than .5 percent of the $1 trillion that pass through ATMs in the U.S. each year, Helwig said. And “when you benchmark the $60,000 [in Montgomery County] against $1 trillion, it’s not a whole lot.”
The crackdowns, Helwig said, have broken up the mafialike connections to the skimming schemes.
But Robert Evans, director of industry marketing at ATM manufacturer NRC, said the high startup costs often mean there’s gang backing for skimmers.
Either way, thieves’ latest technological feats “have come a long way from a mugging at an ATM when someone would just get hit over the head,” Helwig said.
