Card cloners going hi-tech

Four have been discovered over the last fortnight in one Black Country town alone.

Officers in Walsall are so concerned they have resorted to making hourly checks of town centre cashpoints in a bid to stop the crooks.

It comes after a number of recent convictions for criminals caught carrying out the con in the region.

While older cloning devices simply used a camera placed on cash machines to record a pin number before swallowing the cash card, the new versions use bluetooth wireless technology that transmits card and pin number details to nearby laptops.

The card can then be cloned and used.

Pc Carl Grocutt, from the hi-tech crime unit at Walsall Police Station, said: "Whereas the devices we came across in the past were really quite basic, they are getting much cleverer now.

"The new ones are pretty sophisticated and many of them use mobile phone parts and even sometimes entire phones. Cash machines tend to be manufactured in Europe, so while the ones over there use the most up-to-date technology, the ones we have are probably about 12 months behind.

"So because they can no longer get away with it with foreign machines, they are targeting ones here. We've seen a lot of it in Walsall recently, but the whole of the West Midlands is getting hit at the moment."

One Ukrainian man was jailed for two years last month after using a device at Barclays Bank in Aldridge, while a pair of Romanian fraudsters got the same sentence and will be deported after they targeted Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds in Walsall.