The owners of a Nanaimo restaurant are out at least $500 after a customer made off with their debit machine.
Surveillance video shows the man entering the MGM Restaurant about 8:30 p.m. Sunday and placing an order, before grabbing the machine when no one was looking and going out to his car.
He had placed an order for beer and poutine, and made his move when staff was in the kitchen, said the restaurant’s Kevin Samaroo.
Samaroo said his mother was there at the time and said she had a strange feeling about the man.
Nanaimo RCMP Const. Gary O’Brien said it’s believed the man was trying to place a credit-skimming device in the restaurant, but for some reason he didn’t.
“Nevertheless the machine was gone for about 20 minutes and during that time there was at least $500, possibly more, of fraudulent transactions that were made.”
Samaroo said the man tried to put the machine back after he was finished with it but the restaurant had closed.
“He just took the machine with him instead,” he said.
The man was also seen returning later in the evening, presumably to tap into the restaurant’s network and take more money, Samaroo said.
He said he wants other businesses to know what can happen, and to take care their debit machines aren’t in the open.
O’Brien said the exact amount taken won’t be known until the owners’ get their bank statements.
“But they’re advising all their customers to diligently look at their bank accounts.”
He said the incident was “a little bit of a twist” to what he has seen in the past.
“Most of the time they do a distraction, where they go in and distract the clerk and take the machine and physically replace it with a fraudulent one, and leave it there for an hour or two.”
At that point, they can download the data from the fake machine and put it into a program on a laptop, O’Brien said.
“We’ve had situations in the last couple of years where people have had their bank accounts wiped out.”
He said criminals get access to the accounts “and away they go.”
Another way they get into people’s bank accounts is to secretly mount a camera near a bank machine to obtain PINs as they are entered, O’Brien said.
“They’ve got the data being captured and they’ve got the PIN number.”
O’Brien said the restaurant incident serves as a reminder to the public to be careful with their PINs and personal information.
You should always, regardless of the situation, be aware of your bank statements and looking for fraudulent expenses.”
jbell@timescolonist.com
