So…on Friday afternoon my team had a little stroke of luck. We happened to stumble upon a crime in progress, which is nothing short of a miracle considering the number of officers left on the team after 12 months of ‘natural wastage’.
A routine stop-check turned up an habitual burglar/thief from just over the border into the a neighbouring county who had been on a bit of a spending spree with no less than 16 other people’s credit card information.
My crew mate and I were considering where to grab some late lunch when a van on the ring road caught our eye. We put our hunger to one side and stopped this chap in his tatty old long wheel-base Sprinter. There was obviously something not right as it had its hind quarters practically dragging along the tarmac. Once stopped, the grounds for a search were soon evident and we the rear of the van contained modified fuel storage facilities allowing the driver to pump diesel, via the filler cap, straight into the 50 gallon drums in the back. Finding him in possession of enough fuel to get to Russia we searched a little further and found the wad cards stashed behind the center console.
The first six were blank cards and were obviously clones, each with a pin number scribbled on the back in permanent marker. The other ten were genuine cards, again with their respective pin numbers scrawled on the rear.
I didn’t realize it was even possible until today, but years after the introduction of chip and pin, some of the big names still make the illegal purchase of fuel easy. Unbelievably, many still use debit/credit card readers that will allow the magnetic strip on the card to be used as a backup source of data if the chip is damaged, (or in this case, when no chip is present).
With the minuscule amount of attention paid to the card by most sales assistants in these garages, our suspect could have used a library card if it had the right information stored on the strip and the cashier would probably have been far too busy texting his mates on his iPhone to notice!
Anyway, I digress…
After a few choice excuses for his load which were laughable to say the least, the driver lost the gift of speech and refused to discuss his situation with us any more. Cue the usual words and a swiftly applied set of cuffs.
Two hours later we had the results of the section 18 search, and had information relating to a large number of additional online purchases using some of the cards we had already located and stolen card information (the details of which were helpfully still in a cardboard box next to the computer) belonging to more than a dozen further victims.
The usual enquiries began and I drew the “calling all the banks” straw.
Up until this point proceedings were all quite up-beat and cheerful. We had nabbed a proper criminal and had enough evidence to give us a good chance of making something stick for once. These feelings were soon replaced by frustration and eventually anger when I started talking to the banks.
The first bank was quite pleased to hear from us and willingly let me speak to one of their fraud team who took the details I could pass from the cards I had identified as theirs. The second…I shall resist the urge to name them here…were less helpful.
I had numerous sets of card details to give them. With two of them (which were two of the genuine cards from the van) those details included the name of the account holder and all the relevant account information. Others were less comprehensive with only a name, an occasional address and partial card details being available.
It was obvious that a large-scale fraud had taken place and that the owners of these cards were already victims of crime and out-of-pocket to the tune of many hundreds of pounds. I was able to give the bank more than enough information to identify its customers and to put measures in place to prevent losses to them, and to notify them that their cards had been compromised. I also hoped that the bank might be able to fill in a few blanks for me, but knew that was never going to be an easy task.
What amazed me was the fact that the bank, after being contacted by a Police officer who confirmed that a crime had occurred and that their account holders had been victims of fraud, insisted that they would do NOTHING until they were contacted by the account holder to report the unauthorised use of the card. Nothing I could say would make them change their mind. They were quite happy to let their customers lose thousands of pounds between them, and do nothing to notify them, or prevent future losses unless it was reported by the card holder.
Now I am a customer of the same bank, and am disgusted that my bank would risk letting me lose significant amounts of money (if I actually had any for once) rather than making me aware that my card security had been breached. Why would they have this policy…it makes NO SENSE!
Anyway…we tried and that’s what matters. We remanded the suspect over night and threw him in front of a court yesterday morning with a strong application to be remanded in custody while we complete the investigation. In the best traditions of Criminal Justice I heard this morning that, despite the objections of the experienced DC who went to court to make sure everything went smoothly, he was released on bail by the court with an un-tagged curfew which doesn’t even require him to present himself if we check on him.
Thanks for that Your Honour…let’s hope your account remains intact!
