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V O L . X X I I N O. X V I I I A U G U S T 8 , 2 0 1 6 30 W hile the rest of Maine celebrated a long weekend, Scott Chretien discovered thieves had installed a skimming device to read bank cards at the drive-through teller at the York County Federal Credit Union's Sanford headquarters. "I was angry," says Chretien, president and CEO of the credit union, when recalling the incident. "We try to use our members' money wisely as a cooperative." He later heard from the Maine State Police and the FBI that criminals who skimmed and cloned credit cards from all types of terminals were moving north from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His credit union is just over the New Hampshire border. A Kennebec Savings Bank location in Wells also was hit in recent months, along with several point-of-sale terminals in Gray and New Gloucester, including at gas stations. It is not clear whether the same crimi- nals were involved in each incident. Skimming typically is a Class D misuse of identifi cation crime in Maine punishable by up to one year in county jail and a fi ne of up to $2,000. Additional fi nes and jail time could add up depend- ing on how the stolen information is used. e skimming devices, which typically fi t over the original bank or credit union name and add only a frac- tion of an inch to the card slot, also include a camera that can videotape passwords as they are entered. Some skimmers have built-in sensors and software that can determine a password as it is typed. "Change your password often, and cover the keyboard when you are typing in your password," Chretien advises. ere's been a dramatic, and alarming, increase in skimming attacks on ATMs in the past year, in part due to an opportunity left by the time it's tak- ing banks, merchants and gas stations to change from magnetic cards with stripes to those with EMV, or Europay, MasterCard and Visa, chips. " e chip is very complicated in the United States," says Rebekah Higgins, vice president of the Maine Credit Union in Westbrook. She says other countries' governments mandated and helped fund the chip conversion, whereas in the United States it is run by the credit card companies and must be imple- mented by banks and merchants. e key is that as of October 2015 there was a fraud-liability shift, mean- ing that merchants that did not have readers for the chip cards could be liable for any losses due to fraud rather than the card issuers. " is is the last eff ort [by skimmers] before the stripes go out," Higgins says. Not everyone has made the move to chip cards, leaving opportunity for thieves to get personal data from magnetic stripes, she says. e same thing happened in Europe, she adds, before it completed its transition to chip cards. "Not everyone understands the value of their per- sonal information to everyone else," she says. "People need to realize this information is valuable to anyone." FICO, a software company based in San Jose, Calif., that measures consumer credit risk, has been issuing a series of alerts about large and sudden spikes in ATM skimming attacks. On April 8, for example, FICO said its fraud-tracking service recorded a 546% increase in such attacks from 2014 to 2015. e company also said criminal activity was highest at non-bank ATMs, such as those in convenience stores, where 10 times as many machines were compromised in that one-year period. One retailer that was vulnerable was 7-Eleven, and some providers of ATMs to those stores, like Trailhead P H O T O / T I M G R E E N WAY Card skimming Spike in cases has institutions on high alert B y L o r i V a l i g r a F O C U S Gain time and reliability Call to start you transition to the cloud today Gain time and reliability Call to start you transition to the cloud today Your Custom IT Resource 207.729.7600 www.bekinc.net 9 Industrial Parkway #1, Brunswick 207.729.7600 www.bekinc.net Scott Chretien, president and CEO of York County Federal Credit Union, went public about skimming incidents at two different ATMs in Sanford, warning others about the scamming technique. C O R P O R AT E P R I VA C Y & S E C U R I T Y

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