May 15, 2007

NEWS: Manufacturers Asked to Make Fake Cards

A Nova Scotia newspaper reported lately that Don Currie, a credit card manufacturer, complained to police seven years ago that he had been asked to complete an order for a batch of fake credit cards intended to be used in fraud. Currie, the owned of the Bedford-based Plastic Graphics Cards, has been in the business for the better part of two decades, but claims that he had never encountered anything like the aborted order, which came out of Hong Kong. A company representative told Currie that he had found Currie’s business on the Internet, and told him point-blank that he wanted to use the cards for illicit means.

Currie considers himself a straight-up businessman, and says that he couldn’t hang up on the would-be thieves fast enough. But evidence shows that not all card manufacturers are as sterling in their reputations. A popular method of fraud nowadays is committed by cloning credit cards – copying their graphics and component placement to make a look-alike, then encrypting stolen (legit) card data on the magnetic stripe of the faux cards to make an almost identical duplicate. Obviously, not all scamsters are making these copycat dupes in their basement offices – the work is too complex. Someone’s making these cards, and almost certainly knows what they are being used for.

MasterCard, whose cards were involved in the cloning attempt that Currie diverted, said that it would not comment on a story that was so very out-of-date, but pooh-pooh’d the idea that fraud of this type was significant. Outside research shows that some ten percent of all credit card company profits annually might be lost to fraud, however – so it seems that significance, in this case, depends on whose definition is being asked for.


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