Card sharps: the new bank robbers | France 2 | Envoyé Spécial

The French can no longer do without their credit cards: 60 million are in circulation, with annual transactions reaching 450 billion Euros. However, this method of payment is nothing like as secure as we believe! Fraud is booming: at the beginning of January the national crime monitoring centre announced a rise of 30% in just one year. Behind these figures are the swindlers, experts in technology, who can exploit the weaknesses in credit cards and pocket millions! People like Max, an expert in hacking bank cards. He can turn any department store loyalty card into a credit card. When aged 12, this former swindler was already faking tombola tickets at his school in order to win the jackpot. Ten years later, at the end of the 90s, he was perfecting the first capturing devices for cash machines in order to steal the information on the bank cards of the users. 15 years of swindling, 6 years of prison and millions of defrauded Euros later, he agreed to show us how he was able to pirate a cash machine, just like the one you visit any day to withdraw cash. This type of fraud is now the target of a special detective squad. With the Payment Fraud Brigade, we followed the biggest case of bank card fraud ever handled! The figures make your head spin: 3 million Euros defrauded in just a few months, 20 arrests, a hundred policemen deployed on the case. Through this investigation, we learn that the strategies put in place to steal bank card numbers are often worthy of the greatest bank robberies. Except that in this case there’s no need for weapons or violence: a simple click or a clever electronic device will be sufficient to defraud hundreds of millions of Euros in a few seconds.