Eideard

A former Missouri prison inmate has admitted running an identity theft scheme from behind bars, the U.S Attorney’s office said.

Danwine Dewayne Renard, 47, pleaded guilty Wednesday afternoon to four felony charges: conspiracy to commit mail, wire and bank fraud; aiding and abetting bank fraud; and two counts of aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.

Renard was serving time in various Missouri prisons for check kiting and other charges. For more than two years beginning in July of 2008, Renard advised his co-conspirators via phone calls and letters from prison, prosecutors said.

Renard and others obtained personal information in the name of others and Renard’s co-conspirators used those IDs to open bank accounts in Madison and St. Clair counties and elsewhere, prosecutors said.

They would then deposit bogus checks in the accounts and use ATMs to withdraw money that didn’t really exist. They also wrote bad checks on the accounts, prosecutors said. Losses due to the scheme topped $200,000, court documents show.

When he gets out of prison, next time, he’s going to work for Goldman Sachs. Or Congress.

I doubt if federal regulators or anyone charged with Congressional oversight does their job any better than whoever is supposed to be keeping an eye on Missouri felons.

Har!

Police in France are looking for two attractive female thieves who bared their breasts at a man at a cashpoint to distract him before stealing his money.

The women in their 20s exposed themselves to the victim as he punched his pin code into an ATM machine in Paris.

As he stared at one, the other then withdrew 300 euros from his account before the pair fled with the money.

The incident was captured on CCTV at the cash machine on Paris’s Left Bank, but the women could not be identified, a French police spokesman said.

“We would advise anyone withdrawing cash from a machine to focus on what they are doing and not allow themselves to be distracted, however attractive the view,” the spokesman added.

Har!

California welfare recipients using state-issued debit cards withdrew more than $1.8 million in taxpayer cash on casino floors between October 2009 and last month.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order requiring welfare recipients to promise they will use cash benefits only to “meet the basic subsistence needs” of their families. The order also gave the state Department of Social Services seven days to produce a plan to reduce other types of “waste, fraud and abuse” in the welfare program.

The moves came after The Times reported Wednesday that officials at the department failed to notice for years that welfare recipients could use the state-issued cards to withdraw taxpayer cash at more than half of the tribal casinos and state-licensed poker rooms in California. The state initiated the debit card program in 2002.

Casino withdrawals, which represented far less than 1% of total welfare spending during the eight months for which the department released data, averaged just over $227,392 a month.

Schwarzenegger has already ordered the vendor that runs the state welfare system’s ATM network to prohibit the cards from working at casino machines…

No one noticed this was going on for eight years?

As foolish and unproductive is the practice of gambling away your welfare check, the failure of bureaucrats to keep an eye on spending is an example of how useless most “government jobs” become in the United States.

Yup – that’s the ATM intact – sitting in the debris

Suspected robbers in Germany appear to have miscalculated the quantity of explosives needed to blow their way into a rural bank.

The building housing the bank in the northern village of Malliss was largely destroyed by an overnight explosion.

The bank’s cash machine survived intact and the suspected thieves are not thought to have made away with any money, Germany’s Welt Online reported…

The presence of a delivery van near the site of the explosion indicated that the suspected thieves may have intended to drive off with the cash dispenser, local media reported.

The explosion also set the stolen van on fire – so, they escaped on foot.

In all, not a stunning or successful exploit.

Undated file photo
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The man credited with inventing the world’s first automatic cash machine has died.

John Shepherd-Barron passed away at the age of 84 on Saturday after being treated for a brief illness at a hospital in northern Scotland.

Shepherd-Barron once said that he came up with the idea after being locked out of a bank, and that his invention was inspired by a machine that dispensed chocolate candy bars.

“It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world,” he said in a BBC interview in 2007 to mark the ATM’s 40th anniversary.

“I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”

He later sold his concept for an automatic teller machine, now known as an ATM, to Barclay’s Bank more than 40 years ago…

Today, there are at least 1.7 million ATM machines around the world.

Enough for every novice hacker – or mugger – to practice on.

RTFA. Enjoyable. Bright dude.

It’s the ultimate hole-in-the-wall — a money machine that dispenses pure gold.

But installed beneath the gold-coated ceilings of Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel, where royalty and billionaires come for cappuccinos topped with gold flakes, the machine almost seems part of the furniture.

“The reason we chose Emirates Palace is because it really fits with the surroundings here,” said German entrepreneur Thomas Geissler, creator of the “Gold to Go” brand and chief executive of Ex Oriente Lux.

The exterior of the machine is coated with a thin layer of gold and offers customers 320 items to choose from, ranging from gold bars that can weigh up to 10 grams, to customized gold coins…

Through a computer system, the ATM gold machine updates the gold price every 10 minutes to match international markets.

For now, it takes notes of the local dirham currency, but the option of using credit cards will soon be introduced…

“On the first night we had a lot of demand,” he said. “One customer even bought one item of every product we have.”

Where are all the old-fashioned phishing hackers when you need one?

A holiday snap from DefCon

One of the world’s most notorious computer hackers was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to helping run a ring that stole tens of millions of payment card numbers.

Albert Gonzalez, a 28-year-old college dropout from Miami, had confessed to helping lead a global ring that stole more than 40 million payment card numbers by breaking into retailers including TJX Cos Inc, BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc and Barnes & Noble.

It was the harshest sentence ever handed out for a computer crime in an American court, said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Altogether, Gonzalez and conspirators scattered across the globe caused some $200 million in damages to those businesses, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann.

He said it was not possible to quantify how much money was stolen from individuals. “They would quite literally go to ATMS and take out bundles of money from victims’ accounts,” Heymann told the court in Boston.

Under his plea agreement, Gonzalez had faced up to 25 years in prison, but asked the judge for leniency in sentencing, saying he had been addicted to computers since childhood, had abused alcohol and illegal drugs for years and suffered from symptoms of Asperger’s disorder, a form of autism…

Gonzalez, who buried $1 million cash in the backyard of his parents’ home, said that his crimes got out of control “because of my inability to stop my pursuit of curiosity and addiction…”

Throw away the fracking key!

There’s a much longer, more detailed account – if you find this crook interesting – over here.

After the Vegas DEFCON ATM debacle where hackers hacked hackers by setting up a fake ATM in front of the facilities security office, I needed to see how stupid easy it was to buy an ATM and just set it up anywhere. So my search began.

I started looking on e-bay and found plenty of new and used ATMs ranging from $500-2500 but quickly determined I didn’t want to pay $300 for shipping. Next was Craigslist…

I quickly found an ad from a bar north of Boston. They were selling pool tables, Budweiser neon signs and an ATM. I took my hacker with me and met Bob. Bob rented a room above the bar and was doing the deed for the owner. The bar was an old relic that was closing and liquidating its grungy assets. The ATM was sitting right next to the bar covered in 5 years of beer. Thank heavens they were smart enough to cover the keypad in clear plastic…

Needless to say I wanted to unbolt this thing as quickly as possible, get out of there and douse myself head to toe in pure alcohol hand sanitizer. After my hacker played with the manual, got it working and determined it was worth the financial risk, we loaded it on my trailer, paid $750 (down from a grand) and brought it home and put it in my garage.

My hacker comes over to my garage, manual in hand, all giggly, like hackers sometimes do and says “Watch this”. He punches the master codes to access the machines data on a device called an eprom and hundreds of credit and debit card numbers just start falling all over the floor…

Here’s the first of a few upcoming videos of what happened next:

This could make you never want to use an ATM ever again. And stay out of sleazy bars.

Criminals running an ATM card-skimming scam made a big mistake this week: They tried to hit the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas.

As the conference was kicking off a few days ago, attendees noticed that an ATM placed in the Riviera Hotel, which plays host to the annual event, didn’t quite look right, according to a senior conference organizer who identified himself only as Priest. “They looked at the screen where there would normally be a camera,” he said. “It was a little bit too dark, so someone shined a flashlight in there and there was a PC.”

The ATM looked like a working system, but when people would put their cards in the machine, it would scan their card information and record the PIN numbers they entered. He didn’t know how long the ATM had been at the Riviera.

Conference organizers notified local law enforcement who hauled away the machine on “Thursday or Friday,” said Priest, who said he works as a “civil servant” in his day job…

The criminals probably didn’t realize that they were installing their ATM in a hotel that was soon going to be flooded with more than 8,000 security professionals, he added.

They were smart enough to place the machine in one of the few spots in the hotel where there was no security camera to catch them, Priest said. “It was literally right next to the hotel security entrance.”

Couldn’t be a safer place. Hotel security is too busy protecting the gambling operation to worry about someone else stealing.