Law enforcement officials are looking for a man who used a “cloned” debit card to steal cash from another man’s bank account on Dec. 15.
The tech-savvy thief made a phony copy of a man’s debit card and withdrew $503 from a cash machine at the Chase Bank on the corner of 86th Street and Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge at 11:52 pm, a police report says.
Cops busted two men in October for allegedly making fake debit cards — a sophisticated operation involving specialized printers, embossing machines, and magnetizers, police said.
Fraudsters install card readers on cash machines that copy users’ debit card information, according to the authorities. Then the crooks use tiny cameras or old-fashioned over-the-shoulder peeping to catch victims’ personal identification numbers. Swindlers encode the stolen debit card information on blank cards in a process called cloning, then they start withdrawing or spending other people’s cash, cops said.
The NYPD asks those with information about the incident to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577–8477, go to www.nypdcrimestoppers.com, or text-message tips to 274637 and enter “TIP577”.
