Watch: Secret Service, NYPD go after card-skimming devices
NEW YORK (PIX11) — At supermarkets, bodegas, drug stores, banks, and other locations where people use credit or debit cards, about one in every ten card readers may have a skimming device attached to it, according to the U.S. Secret Service.
The devices, which steal the financial information of cardholders, are then used by the criminals who install them to drain cardholders' accounts.
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The fraud also happens frequently with cards for the SNAP program, which is sometimes also called food stamps, as well as with EBT cards. Those crimes put some of the most needy people at risk of losing badly needed benefits.
It's why the Secret Service, in conjunction with the NYPD, the USDA, the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, and other local agencies, carried out a three-day sweep to find skimming devices, and investigate the people behind them.
The effort, called Operation Flagship, found more than 50 devices out of some 700 that agents checked.
One of those skimmers was in the card slot of an ATM at a major chain drugstore on the Lower East Side. James Lillo, an NYPD detective who specializes in fighting financial crimes, is also an expert at removing skimming devices.
After using a few different tools, he was able to pull the skimmer from inside the ATM card slot. He pointed to the metal plate, shaped like a lower case -h, that he'd removed, and showed a tiny set of electronics wired onto one side of it.
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'The data would be transmitted into the flash memory here,' Lillo said, pointing to a microchip card on the device.
He then showed a millimeters-thin plastic panel that had been affixed next to the ATM's keypad. The panel had a pinhole in it. Behind that nearly microscopic hole was a tiny camera and a memory card.
The camera 'runs video from here, capturing the customers' — in this case [the] victims' — PIN numbers,' Lillo explained.
That one ATM was set up to find and save hundreds of PIN numbers and card numbers that scammers were using to drain people's accounts, according to the Secret Service.
Michael Peck is the assistant special agent-in-charge at the New York office of the U.S. Secret Service. Peck said that Operation Flagship is a nationwide effort, and of all of the locations participating across the country, 'As an operation in recovery' of skimming devices, 'New York has been our largest one to date.'
He said that nationwide, Las Vegas, Nevada, had the highest number of stores, banks and other businesses entered by agents during the operation. However, as a percentage of devices seized, New York had the highest numbers. More than 19 percent of all devices seized nationwide were in New York City.
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That fact emphasized how pervasive the problem is here in New York. It really adds up, said Peck, the Secret Service assistant special agent-in-charge.
'$16.2 million has been the prevented loss to people that really need it,' he said in an interview at Secret Service Headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn.
Daniel Alessandrino, another NYPD financial crimes detective, led a local team searching for devices. In three locations that they checked within a few blocks of one another on the Lower East Side, the team found two devices.
The next steps, Alessandrino said, involve pinpointing the people who install skimming devices.
'[We] locate video,' he said during an interview in a supermarket where the team searched all of its checkout line card readers, referring to the surveillance video system in the store.
Even though the supermarket was not one of the three locations where devices were found, Alessandrino said that video systems like the one in the store demonstrate how they nab skimming criminals. Once a device is found, he said, detectives look at video of the place where the device had been installed, 'to possibly locate the subjects leaving [a store], where we're able to then, hopefully, with our technology, identify who they are.'
That kind of work, said Dan Leero, a Secret Service technical special agent, is part of a cooperation between his agency, which is responsible for the security of U.S. currency, and local law enforcement agencies.
'We rely heavily on the NYPD,' the Secret Service agent said, 'to know their neighborhoods, to know these areas.'
The Secret Service also says that customers can help to stop skimming crimes, by taking protective measures.
'Watch your [account] balances,' said Peck, the special agent-in-charge, 'protect your PINs, use the chip' on a card, rather than swipe it. 'If you can,' he continued, 'use tap and pay.'
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