Trinidad: Card skimmers steal 200k from Scotiabank customers

(Trinidad Guardian) Skim­mers have re­port­ed­ly suc­cess­ful­ly stolen close to $.2 mil­lion from bank ac­counts be­long­ing to Sco­tia­bank cus­tomers.

In the lat­est scam, which po­lice said oc­curred on Fri­day be­tween 8 pm and 11 pm, mon­ey was with­drawn from bank ac­counts through card skim­ming. Vic­tims from Fri­day had as much as $5,000 with­drawn from their ac­counts.

Yes­ter­day, two of the vic­tims con­tact­ed the T&T Guardian and said they had lodged of­fi­cial re­ports at the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice’s Fraud Squad and Sco­tia­bank’s Port-of-Spain head of­fice.

One of the vic­tims, who wished not to be iden­ti­fied, said when he went to the bank yes­ter­day there were sev­er­al oth­er vic­tims just like him­self wait­ing in line to re­port card skim­ming episodes.

“We hope that the stolen monies are re­vert­ed to our ac­counts as soon as pos­si­ble and that se­cu­ri­ty is beefed up by the bank to avoid such an in­ci­dent from oc­cur­ring in the fu­ture. You al­ways hear about it but when it hap­pens to you it is very dis­tress­ing,” the vic­tim said.

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, a bank of­fi­cial who wished not to be iden­ti­fied, said she could not com­ment on the mat­ter. How­ev­er, she di­rect­ed cus­tomers to the bank’s web­site where cus­tomers who have fall­en vic­tims to fraud­sters to con­tact the bank im­me­di­ate­ly at 625PLUS (625-7587).

In­ci­dents of phish­ing and skim­ming have been on the rise in re­cent years.

Phish­ing is a type of iden­ti­ty theft where crim­i­nals use emails to try to bait peo­ple in­to fake web­sites. Once there, you are asked to dis­close con­fi­den­tial fi­nan­cial and per­son­al in­for­ma­tion, like pass­words, cred­it card num­bers, ac­cess codes or so­cial in­sur­ance num­bers. The most pop­u­lar type of phish­ing scam is an e-mail threat­en­ing se­ri­ous con­se­quences if you do not log in and take ac­tion im­me­di­ate­ly.

Sco­tia­bank has con­tin­u­al­ly not­ed it does not send cus­tomers un­so­licit­ed emails ask­ing for con­fi­den­tial in­for­ma­tion, such as your pass­word, PIN, ac­cess code, cred­it card and ac­count num­bers. Cus­tomers who have re­ceived a fraud­u­lent email are asked to for­ward it to phish­ing@sco­tia­bank.com.