The Ashes

Though its been known to happen in serial television dramas, card skimming – the act of rigging up a machine to loot the information from a debit card during an ostensibly legitimate transaction – appears to have manifested itself in reality today in the form of a pirated ATM in East Village, Manhattan.

Mr. Sean Seibel was inside the Chase Bank at that particular location when he attempted to use one of two ATM machines. The machine told him that it could not read his card, and he noticed that it was difficult to extract the card from the slot. After trying a few more times with little success, he inspected the slot of the ATM and was astounded to find that it had a false plastic cover over its entry space. The false cover was even colored to match the Chase ATM perfectly. Mr. Seibel also discovered a second mirror on the ATM, suspect since the neighboring ATM only had one. The mirror was found to have a tiny pinhole drilled into it, behind which a camera looked out upon the PIN pad of the ATM.

Says Sean, “Take this as a warning and please inspect every ATM machine you use, no matter how secure you think the environment is.” Scary stuff, folks! Beware!