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Crooks steal a march on identity protection technology

FT.com / World / UK - Crooks steal a march on identity protection technology

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor
Published: September 5 2005 03:00 | Last updated: September 5 2005 03:00

New technologies such as chip-and-pin credit cards and biometric identity cards are more likely to exacerbate identity theft and fraud, a criminologist said yesterday.

Emily Finch, reader in law at the University of East Anglia, told the British Association science festival in Dublin that her research showed that criminals were adapting successfully to the arrival of chip and pin.

With the previous generation of credit and debit cards, criminals would get hold of a card and then forge the holder's signature. "The focus has changed to getting the pin first and then getting the card," Dr Finch said.

It was easy to obtain pin numbers by spying because many people did not bother to shield the pad properly as they entered the number. Criminals would then track the owner until a suitable occasion arose to steal the card. Dr Finch said her academic group won the trust of career criminals, interviewed them about their techniques and observed the way customers and retail staff responded to cards under varying circumstances.

"Our research has shown that fraudsters are tenacious, merely adapting their strategies to circumvent new security measures rather than desisting from fraudulent behaviour," she said.

The fundamental problem, said Dr Finch, was that "excessive reliance on technology to combat fraudulent behaviour leads to a breakdown in the vigilance that is customarily exercised, thus increasing rather than decreasing the opportunities for fraudulent behaviour". This was seen in shops, where chip-and-pin technology has made cashiers far less vigilant than they were.

One way a fraudster could take advantage was to present a stolen card and, when invited to type in his or her pin, enter four random digits. "Fraudsters are always so nice and plausible, so they'll apologise, chat for a bit and convince the assistant that they haven't got the hang of the new system," Dr Finch said. "The assistant will then fall back on the old system and fail to check the signature properly."

To demonstrate the lack of vigilance, she said that she and a male research colleague had used each other's credit cards for a long period without being challenged on the grounds that a woman was using a card with a male name or vice versa.

Since chip-and-pin technology was still being phased in, said Dr Finch, the banking and retail industries had no good data to show if it was working.

Although details of the national identity card scheme were not yet known, her research suggested that it would "exacerbate rather than resolve the problems of fraudulent identity".

September 6, 2005 at 09:09 AM in Smart Cards | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home