Reports of credit and debit card fraud continue to pile up in the Ukiah area, where more than 100 people have reported their accounts were hijacked, according to police and banks. More than 2,000 others have had their debit cards blocked as a precaution.
"Fraud's still cropping up," said Ukiah Police Detective Dave McQueary.
How it's being perpetrated remains a mystery to police.
Credit card processing companies have a good idea where and how the cards were compromised, based on patterns of use, but they haven't divulged the information, bank officials said.
Police and some bank officials believe the breaches occurred at multiple businesses in the Ukiah area.
"I can't point fingers but it's local merchants," said Richard Cooper, chief executive officer of the Mendo-Lake Credit Union.
McQueary said he suspects businesses in the area had their credit and debit card scanners tapped by thieves, who typically install equipment that skims information from the cards. Some skimming devices send the data through wireless technology, others need to be retrieved by the culprits.
Savings Bank of Mendocino County Vice-President Marty Lombardi believes the problem is too widespread to be explained by skimming devices, which were to blame in the recent debit card fraud perpetrated through Bay Area Lucky Supermarkets.
"The skimming card thing, that's kid's stuff," he said.
He believes the thieves hacked into the data base of a processing company that provides credit card services to area businesses. It was a bank-card processor who notified Savings Bank that 1,100 accounts had been compromised, Lombardi said. He said he does not know the name of the card processing company. Only a small portion of the breached accounts were defrauded, he said.
Lombardi said he did not know how many of his customers were defrauded. Mendo-Lake Credit Union and Redwood Credit Union each reported about 60. Lombardi said all the area banks suffered losses.
The losses are being covered by the banks and their insurance companies. But if this kind of large-scale fraud continues, bank customers likely will be paying higher bank fees, Lombardi said.
Until the source of the breach is pinpointed and the problem fixed, McQueary suggests that people avoid using their debit and credit cards.
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