Friday, January 4, 2008
Suuuure……
ATM's Hacked: Citibank Limits ATM Cash Withdrawals
How long before UK Banks start limiting cash withdrawls in the same way?.
Citibank has joined the Hotel California Hedge Fund method of allowing withdrawals. Check your money out anytime you like, it just can't leave. A jump in ATM fraud has led Citibank to slash the maximum amount of cash available to customers from their accounts. In some cases by half. The new cap on cash distributed by the banks's ATMs began in mid-December after what Citibank called "isolated fraudulent activity" in New York City. Daily News reports that one Brooklyn woman said she went to her bank branch on Christmas Eve and was unable to take out her normal cash limit, so she called customer assistance. "She told me customer accounts had been hacked into through cash machines around the city,"Posted by lvmreader @ 03:44 PM (3262 views)
12 thoughts on “Suuuure……”
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paul says:
It is very interesting that the “Brooklyn woman”‘s identity is not revealed by any of the reporting sources. The reason?
SHE DOESN’T EXIST.
I’ve seen this “strawman” trick used a few times by the media – identifying an unnamed individual to whom something happened and using it as justification for a completely different, unrelated measure, or as proof of an untested theory.
The most recent example was the invention of a lone trader who pushed the price of crude over $100 a barrel. The person never existed but it was a story designed to try to calm the oil market by sawying that it was a “blip” or “anomaly”. The reality was that it is a new dawn.
drewster says:
My bank already caps cash-machine withdrawals at £250 per day. This has always been the case, for security reasons. Northern Rock had similar limits in place for its customers, but it didn’t prevent a run on the bank. Incidentally the reason there were long queues outside NR is because their online banking system crashed due to high demand. If the run had been confined to online accounts, there would have been no photos for the media and the run might not have have happened.
Dontpanic says:
Actually its been like this for some time now!
paul says:
Yes, but the fact that Northern Rock’s online account system was offline is suspicious anyway. Rumours were circulating about Northern Rock months before it happened both here and in the finance industry.
I heard it here this time last year that Northern Rock was looking distinctly crumbly.
Icarus says:
According to a recent report it seems Mervyn was warned TWO YEARS ago about what the Crock was doing. He told the informant that she didn’t understand banking. One wonders why the likes of Citibank come up with excuses like this to limit cash withdrawals. It’s obvious that few people over the age of five believe them.
inbreda says:
Yeah – HPC posse are 6 months ahead of “no-one could have seen the credit crunch coming” reality.
Chilli says:
I find it really hard to believe that the ATM was ‘hacked’…
You would surely have to get into the machine to do anything. The only thing taken off your card is the card number, which prompts manual entry of a pin that has to match the card number. Once you have those in agreement, you get the account number from a remote system.
Because of the manual entry of the PIN, it would take years to somehow stumble onto the right combination – its impossible.
If you get into the box on the other hand, you might be able to do something. But then you could just reach for the cashbox. This is not fraud anymore, its outright breaking and entering.
This tale is a complete farce. A poor one at that.
The only effect it will have is to cause more people to charge to their credit cards. A credit crunch is caused by the available credit. Cash has nothing to do with it. They can print all the cash they like as long as they have the right to do so (ie loaned the digital equivalent from the central bank).
This is a pure logistical issue or a red herring…irrelevant.
alan says:
Thanks gents, that’s very reassuring.
However, in the Eagles song, the Hotel California was managed by a Witches Coven. Are the US banks managed by a “special team” of evildoers? (Lara Croft blamed the Illuminati) Nobody seems to have addressed a possible conspiritorial force in the blogs so far.
Ok, I’ll go first – how about they are located in Goldman Sachs head office?
lvmreader says:
Now now, @Alan, that could be classed as racist
drewster says:
Few people know about the near-collapse in the UK banking system in the early 1990s. The story was kept secret for many years under various non-disclosure agreements. Read this for information: The Register: How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking.
@paul: It’s quite possible that NR took their online banking system offline deliberately in order to stem the flow of cash. However, speaking as someone who works in IT, it does seem more likely that their systems would have crashed with the high load anyway.
The important point is this: a technical fault with the payment system is completely unrelated to a crisis of liquidity or solvency.
paul says:
More likely drewster, that the people who keep the online system ticking along were diverted away to work on other things.
I work in IT too.
quiet guy says:
Attacks against ATM machines are not unknown. Here is an account of a previous attack on Citibank ATMs:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_the_atm.html
Also, a couple of other reports regarding ATM security problems:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/atm_eavesdroppi_1.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/programming_atm.html
This is more likely to be a screw up than a conspiracy.