by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Buying beer usually signifies imminent good times. But for 24-year-old Mile-End resident David Macleod, his debit card purchase of a six-pack two weeks ago at a local dep led to a financial nightmare. Later that night, someone deposited a non-existent $5,000 into his account, then made a series of withdrawals totalling $1,500. He only had $500 in his account.

Macleod says the dep somehow copied the information on the magnetic stripe on the back of his card, and then surreptitiously took down his personal identification number (PIN) as he entered it on the point of sale machine.

“I woke up the next day and my card didn’t work,” Macleod says. He contacted his bank, the Royal, that day, and they informed him that he’d been screwed. “I thought about it,” he says, “and I remember the guy at the dep hovering around when I entered my PIN. I also remembered him doing something weird underneath the counter with my card.” He filed a police report, and the bank is investigating.

If his suspicions are correct (“I’m not positive, but I’m 90 per cent sure it was this place,” he says), then he was the victim of “skimming.” In early October, the Toronto police arrested 19 people on 166 charges relating to debit card fraud. In a subsequent statement, the police described how retail customers would swipe their cards at fake point-of-sale terminals, receive their purchase and a receipt, while the information on their magnetic stripes was recorded and their PIN copied.

“The organized-crime ring would then take the recorded financial information and use it to deplete the account at a later date,” the police said. “The consumer would not be able to note the point of compromise as the original transaction would never appear on their bank statement.”

The problem comes down to technology, says Catherine Johnston, president and CEO of the Ajax, Ontario-based Advanced Card Technologies Association of Canada. “In our wallets, on our ID and payment cards, are a very old technology,” she says. “It changed our lives in such a wonderful way, but they were designed in what certainly was a much safer world. The technology was not designed to keep people from impersonating someone. What skimming amounts to is identity theft.” (Perhaps the largest case of ID theft ever surfaced this Tuesday morning, when U.S. authorities announced they had arrested three men charged with stealing credit information from over 30,000 people, with losses calculated at $2.7-million (U.S.) and counting.)

Johnston says members of the Interac network have an agreement amongst themselves that has them recouping the loss and reimbursing victims of fraud after an investigation finds a victim blameless. That’s what David Macleod is hoping for, and should find out in a week or two. But the incident has left him very angry. “I’ve been a customer at that dep for three years,” he says. “It’s not like I’m some shmuck who walked in off the street. We said hi to each other, and these guys totally fucked me up the ass.” :