Four employees of Imperfecto Ruin Pub in Noida’s Logix Mall were recently booked for allegedly cloning credit and debit cards from customers and passing off the details to their accomplices in return for a commission for the past six months. This is the second such case exposed in the past one month, after an employee of Burger King restaurant at GIP Mall was held doing the same. While the police is doing further investigations to catch the bigger fish behind the scam, those who have fallen victim to the fraud in Noida say they have learnt an important lesson.Anand Vihar resident Sonu Rajput realised his card details were cloned at Imperfecto Ruin Pub, which he visited on New Year’s Eve, only after he saw reports in newspapers earlier this month. On January 20, Rs 20,000 were withdrawn from his account from an ATM in Dadri in two transactions of Rs 10,000 each. “It was on a Sunday morning that I saw the message on my phone and immediately checked if I had lost my card. I had the card but I was perplexed to see that Rs 20,000 had been debited from my account. I immediately called my bank and got my card blocked,” says Rajput, who is an IP University student pursuing BBA.Rajput also filed a police complaint and tried to trace where his card could have been cloned. “I tried to remember where I had been in the past few days in order to figure out where the card details could have been stolen. However, the fact that it happened 20 days before the incident at a pub where I had gone to celebrate New Year’s Eve never crossed my mind,” says the 22-year-old.Nidhi Chowdhury, a Madhu Vihar resident, is also one of the victims of card cloning at the Noida pub. On November 26, `14,500 were debited from her account from an ATM in Indirapuram in one transaction. She had visited the pub on November 18 to celebrate her birthday with friends. “I never keep a large amount of money in the account whose card I use for transactions. I am always careful when I enter my card details online and I never let my card out of my sight. I always thought I was safe from such frauds but surprisingly, I still got scammed,” says Chowdhury, who works at a content writing firm in Sector 4.Both victims first contacted their banks and then filed complaints at their nearest police stations. “The employees at the pub used to send the card and pin details to their accomplices who would conduct transactions at some far off ATM, after a gap of at least one week. In this way, the victims were led to believe that the card was cloned at a recently visited place rather than a place they had visited a while ago,” says Pradeep Tripathi, Station House Officer at Sector 24 police station.These incidents have put the focus on the conversation on how to be vigilant while using a credit or debit card at restaurants or pubs and ensure that they don’t get misused. According to Anuj Aggarwal, Chairman, Centre for Research on Cyber Crime and Cyber Law, people need to be more careful while making payments through cards.“Most of the time, you hand over your card to the waiter to swipe it. One should never do that. People tend to blindly trust merchants with their cards at reputed places, which is why such scammers target these pubs and restaurants,” says Aggarwal.He adds that one should always cover the keypad of the card machine and then enter the PIN. “Many people don’t do it because it might look childish, but it is the safest way to secure your card from cloning. The skimmers installed in the machine steal the card information but not the pin. The pin is seen by the scammer and memorised or written down in order to be used later,” he says.He adds that people should also ask their banks to provide them with cards with chips instead of magnetic strips. “These card skimmers are made for stealing information through magnetic strips. But if a person uses a chip-based card, which banks started issuing recently, it may be harder to clone,” says the Delhi-based cyber expert. However, he adds that it may be possible that scammers find new ways to clone chip-based cards, so it is better to be always careful while making transactions through cards.

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