Fraudsters' bugs transmit credit card details to Pakistan

Thieves have planted new sophisticated bugs in supermarket card readers so customer details can be cloned

Detectives are investigating a sophisticated credit card fraud against customers of some of Britain’s biggest supermarkets that may be linked to extremists in Pakistan. 

Fraudsters have targeted more than 40 stores in Britain, including those of Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, in an elaborate scam that police say involves tiny devices inserted into the stores’ “chip and Pin” credit card readers. 

Specialists say the technology is the most advanced they have seen and is being used in supermarket chains across Europe. 

The devices, which are reported to have been made in China, are reading and storing selected customers’ Mastercard and personal identification numbers as the cards are inserted into readers at supermarket checkout tills.

The bugs transmit the information by wireless technology to Lahore, Pakistan, according to a senior American counter-intelligence official. 

Customers’ cards are then cloned and used to steal money from their credit and current accounts and to pay for items such as airline tickets on the internet. 

A senior British police source said he was unable to confirm reports in America that as much as $100m had been siphoned out of customers’ accounts. 

The fraud was revealed by Joel Brenner, the American government’s top counter-intelligence officer. He said: “Small but intelligent criminal organisations are pulling off transnational, multicontinental heists that only a foreign intelligence service would have been able to do a few years ago.” 

The US National Security Agency, which monitors electronic communications worldwide, is said to be tracking the case because of its links to Pakistan, which has become a base for Al-Qaeda. 

A counter-terrorism official in Britain emphasised yesterday that the authorities here had yet to uncover clear evidence of any scam linked to Al-Qaeda, but said they did not rule out the emergence of such evidence. 

This weekend MPs called for a full investigation. Patrick Mercer, a member of the Commons home affairs committee, said: “This is a deeply worrying matter and I hope the authorities aren’t in denial about any links to terrorism.” 

There is growing evidence that terrorist groups are resorting to sophisticated technology to raise money. 

Last month a London court convicted a Sri Lankan gang with suspected links to the Tamil Tiger terrorist group of running an elaborate credit card fraud at petrol stations across the country. 

Cameras installed in secret compartments in the ceilings above the credit card readers recorded motorists putting in their Pin numbers. Account information was also electronically copied as the cards were put into readers. This was sent abroad and employed to clone credit cards that were subsequently used around the world. 

A Mastercard spokesman declined to discuss details of the latest case but said safeguarding financial information was a top priority. 

Rising concern about the growth in credit card fraud has led Mastercard to improve monitoring of unusual or suspicious transactions. It has started sending automated calls to card holders’ mobile phones asking them to confirm recent transactions. 

In the latest scam the gang is suspected of having tampered with the chip and Pin machines, either during their manufacture in China or at some point after they came off the production line. 

A special chip is inserted behind the machine’s motherboard and it sends, by mobile phone, the details and Pins of selected cards to criminals in Lahore. Brenner said: “It was impossible to tell, even for someone working at the factory, that they had been tampered with.” 

Jemma Smith, a spokesman for Apacs, the interbank group that leads the fight against card fraud, said that a special police unit was investigating Pin pads at 40 stores, including those of Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. 

“The police are aware of Pin pads having been tampered with, with devices inside them that wire information,” she said. However, no investigation by the unit had yet uncovered links to Lahore, she said. 

Shoppers at Asda in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, reported last month that their cards had been used to make illicit withdrawals overseas after they had visited the store. One customer said 25 withdrawals from his account, totalling £1,400, had been made in the US and Pakistan. 

The banking industry hoped that chip and Pin cards, introduced in February 2006, would help cut fraud. However, total card fraud losses increased by 14% in the six months to June 2008 compared with the first half of last year. Total card losses for this period were £301.7m, of which more than 40% was fraud abroad. continues here

Jailed: Mother who held up daughter's severed fingers in court and claimed a 'voodoo curse' made her commit £1m benefit fraud

A £1million benefit fraud who claimed she acted under a voodoo curse – and produced her daughter's severed fingers in court as evidence – was jailed for five years yesterday.

A judge told Remi Fakorede, 46, that her testimony had been 'utterly unbelievable'.

Mother-of-six Fakorede had invented at least five phantom families, some with disabled children, to claim tax credits. 

During her three-week trial she claimed her bank accounts had been taken over by a 'voodoo man', whose curse had already killed her mother. 

Asked why she did not contact police, she told jurors that when her daughter was a baby, she suffered kidney failure and her fingers dropped off. 

She said the voodoo man told her she would suffer the same fate if she exposed the plot. 

It was at that point that she reached into her pocket and brought out a piece of tissue containing three little fingers. 

DNA tests confirmed that they belonged to her daughter, who is understood to have suffered from gangrene after her kidney failure. 

One juror was left in tears by the macabre stunt. 

Yesterday, Judge Jacqueline Beech told Fakorede: 'I find you to be a thoroughly dishonest woman. Your conduct in court was a barefaced attempt to manipulate the jury.' 

Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London had heard that £500,000 passed through Fakorede's bank accounts during the five-year scam, with a wider crime 'syndicate' linked to Nigeria pocketing £936,933. 

Fakorede, who holds British and Nigerian passports, was already receiving an annual income of up to £40,000 from property in Nigeria. 

She also ran a hairdressing salon and owned two East London properties worth hundreds of thousands. 

But she told housing benefit authorities she was penniless and out of work. 

She submitted 39 claims for tax credits, largely for children she had invented, and used a string of stolen National Insurance numbers. 

The court heard the handwriting on most of the the false claim forms could be linked to Fakorede, of Hackney, East London, and the cash was paid into an account in her maiden name. 

In the only case where she used her own name, she lied about her work and claimed for a child she did not have. 

She said she was a single mother, but investigators discovered her husband was still with her, although he has since left.

Judge Beech called the scam, which ran from August 2002 to June last year, 'a wholesale assault on the benefit system'. 

She condemned the ease with which Fakorede had been able to carry out the fraud and called for a review of the system which allows benefits to be paid into any bank account. 

Fakorede had denied committing fraud, but showed no reaction to the verdict until discussions began about confiscating her assets, when she sank her head into her hands. 

Her daughter, Denise Shofolawe- Coker, 21, was jailed for a year for laundering £70,000. continues here

Sometimes I think we must be mad, quite, quite mad, for permitting them to come, for permitting them to assail us so, there is no circumstance to my mind that, would allow permanent residence for non-Europeans, nor even for predatory migrants from European countries. A people have an absolute right to homogeneity, to there people specific culture and any government, institution or individual that works counter to this principle commits the highest treason. Remi Fakorede, robbed us, calculatedly helped herself, yet all of these new-comers rob us, some legally and some as in the case of Remi Fakorede illegally.

The difference is the level of robbery, as far as the government is concerned, one can, drag ones family through country after country, land here by whatever means and live off us and that is okay, protected by government and all the apparatus of the state, yet milk more and one is a criminal, I ask what is the difference. What is the difference to the old, dying in winter afraid to turn up the heat, what is the difference for the legions left languishing on the dole, what is the difference for the homeless, what is the difference for all of us and our ancestors before us, who built this Europe.

Can you not hear us or do you still refuse to listen, they do not belong here and we do not deserved to be treated in this way, what gives so many the right to rob us and yet it is a crime to cry out, a crime to state our grievance in, this the purported home of the free. The biggest thief of course is government, not only do they rob us but they invent legislation to jail us should we speak out, freedom is a lie, you must live to their laws or suffer a dire fate. So creatures such as Remi Fakorede, will always have free reign to rob our countries, to live off the toil of the workers, parasites amongst us, sucking us dry, protected by a treacherous government. 14

Mother ‘invented children to claim £1m tax credit’

A mother invented a string of disabled children and hijacked the identity of several women to claim nearly £1 million in fraudulent tax credits, a court was told. 

Remi Fakorede, 46, recruited her daughter Denise Shofolawe-Coker, 21, to help to launder the profits from the deception that ran for five years, it was alleged. 

Ms Fakorede, from Hackney, East London, is accused of submitting 39 false claims for tax credits, including for fictitious disabled children, on forms and via the internet.

A jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court was told that Ms Fakorede also assumed the identities of several women, using their stolen national insurance numbers to make false claims. Ms Fakorede denies fraud. continues here

Jailed: council officer who helped herself to £110,000

A FORMER senior officer at Peterborough City Council has been jailed for two years after abusing her position of trust to steal £110,000 of taxpayers' money.
While employed as a project manager within the council's children's services department, Bintu Tijani spent 12 months concocting fake invoices to siphon off almost a 10th of her team's annual budget into her own bank accounts.

On Friday a judge told the 35-year-old expectant mother that a lengthy spell behind bars was the only appropriate punishment for the "serious and sophisticated fraud".

Prosecutors are also launching a claim to claw back her illegal profits under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

Peterborough Crown Court was told Tijani, of Abbotsbury, Orton Malborne, Peterborough, secured a job with the council in May 2004, despite having disclosed a criminal conviction from 10 years earlier for credit card fraud.

As manager of the council's family support strategy team, she was responsible for an annual budget of £1.2 million and dealt with funding for children's services.

But the court heard she abused her seniority to create an elaborate scheme, using fraudulent invoices from imaginary companies.

Ebraham Mooncey, prosecuting, said: "Over a period of approximately one year, she submitted 12 false invoices totalling £110,250, knowing them to be fraudulent, for her own financial gain."

Evidence of Tijani's wrongdoing was uncovered by fraud investigators at the council following her suspension from work on an unrelated matter in October last year.

She was sacked a month later, and the evidence was passed on to the police.

Hugh Vass, mitigating, said his client admitted the offences at the first opportunity, but she could not explain where all the money had gone.

"If she knows, she has chosen not to disclose it," he said.

"She says £80,000 was sent to her mother in Nigeria, and she was also involved with a man who was unemployed and claims she had got into debt subsidising his lifestyle.

"It is right that the ratepayers of Peterborough have lost a considerable amount of money. continues here