Local News

Card skimmer spotted in Exeter High Street?

09/10/11 - 2 comments

Shoppers in Exeter may have been the target of a card skimming scheme, designed to rob shoppers in Exeter's High Street of their hard earned cash.

It looks like a card skimmer was installed on the NatWest cash-point outside Boots, although it's not known how long it has been in place for. There are visible marks on the fascia of the cash-point where the the original card slot has been removed and the new device added.

We noticed the suspect mechanism in place on Saturday afternoon, and after spending a while trying to work out who exactly something like this should be reported to (NatWest was shut, as were their phone lines, ActionFraudUK was shut for the weekend as well), the Police were informed.

By the evening the cash-point was showing as out of service so hopefully we have managed to limit the amount of people who could have been affected, although when we checked the machine on Saturday night the 'skimmer' was still in place and had not been removed from the cash-point for investigation, so if you've used it recently it's probably worth contacting your bank.

Card skimming works by adding a new device over the top of the legitimate card slot, which reads the card's magnetic strip as it is inserted. A secondary unit is sometimes secreted about the cash point, usually a camera pointed at the pin-pad to record the victim's pin number as it is entered. We had a cursory look at the time but couldn't see anything as obvious as the badly installed skimmer.

Have you used this cash-point in the past few days? Did you notice anything out of place? Let us know in the comments.

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