Cutting Edge of Technology?
– By Pushpa Sathish, Staff Writer
Is this what they mean by doing your groundwork before embarking on a project? Crooks in the town of Port Stephens in New South Wales, Australia, took care to cut several lines belonging to the telecom company Telstra before they went on a shopping spree using stolen credit cards.
Internet, telephone and data connections were down for a few hours on three days in December, during which the police believe that purchases were made using credit cards that have been reported lost or stolen. The thieves were relying on the manual transactions that stores fall back on during power and telephone outages, to get them safely past the checkout counter. The use of stolen credit cards does not raise immediate red flags when the lines are down, and stores generally do not call to confirm purchases that fall below the $200 mark with banks.
While the police are scoring the area with a dragnet and using footage from closed-circuit cameras to try to bring the crooks to book, they are too sure that they have estimated the real extent of the damage done. Retailers who are sure that the banks will compensate them for smaller purchases will be reluctant to step forward and admit that they’ve been robbed, and this is just going to be one more hurdle in the cops’ path to the crooks!
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Sagar
January 11th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Technology is always exploited by smart thieves. According to latest reports, there has been a 60 percent increase in the credit card fraud cases as compared to the previous years.