A few days after Christmas, the phone rang in Christine Jones’ home in Dudley.

It was her bank. 

‘Are you attempting to withdraw money in Pakistan?’ they asked. ‘I told them that, of course, I wasn’t,’ says the 51-year-old. 

‘I said couldn’t they see that only the night before I’d used the card to buy tickets for Cinderella at the Grand Theatre in Wolverhampton. I’m not that much of a jet-setter!’

Use any one of the 69,000 cash machines in Britain and you run the risk of being duped by thieves who are after the cards themselves or simply the data they contain

Unknown to Christine, a psychiatric nurse, her cashpoint card had been ‘skimmed’ — or cloned — when she withdrew money from an ATM in her West Midlands home town.

The information the scammers had obtained was being used nearly 4,000 miles away in Multan, braindumps the fifth largest city in Pakistan, to take out £160. 

Fortunately, her bank — Santander — was able to prevent the transaction going through.

RELATED ARTICLES Previous 1 Next Shameless swagger of gang who made fake credit cards to buy… Halifax bank adviser helped fiancé steal £123,000 from… Share this article Share Not everyone is so lucky.

For this kind of fraudulent activity — for which a Rochdale gang was jailed last week for a total of 16 years — costs banks and businesses more than £50 million a year, not to mention the inconvenience caused to those whose accounts are targeted.

And we are all vulnerable. Use any one of the 69,000 cash machines in Britain and you run the risk of being duped by thieves who are after the cards themselves or simply the data they contain.

They obtain this by surreptitiously fitting devices over the slot where the card is entered into the cash machine.

Some devices will simply keep individual cards, which are then retrieved by the scammer the moment the card’s owner gives up waiting and walks away.

Other more sophisticated devices will electronically record the data of every card entered and free unicc shop then return the card as normal, so victims have no idea that their bank account has been compromised.

As for the PIN — that supposedly foolproof second layer of security — it’s recorded by cameras hidden above or beside the keyboard as the unsuspecting user taps it in.

More sophisticated devices will electronically record the data of every card entered and then return the card as normal, so victims have no idea that their bank account has been compromised

Thanks to the Rochdale case, which saw a criminal gang net up to £2 million, it’s become clear in recent weeks just how easy this is to do using increasingly cheap and evermore widely available technology.