By Henry Samuel
Telegraph.co.uk
Dr Joel Brenner, the US National Counterintelligence Executive, warned that hundreds of chip and pin machines in stores and supermarkets across Europe have been tampered with to allow details of shoppers' credit card accounts to be relayed to overseas fraudsters.
These details are then used to make cash withdrawals or siphon off money from card holders' accounts in what is one of the largest scams of its kind.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph, America's counterintelligence chief said: "Previously only a nation state's intelligence service would have been capable of pulling off this type of operation. It's scary."
An organised crime syndicate is suspected of having tampered with the chip and pin machines, either during the manufacturing process at a factory in China, or shortly after they came off the production line.
In what is known as a "supply chain attack", criminals managed to bypass security measures and doctor the devices before they were dispatched from the factories where they were made.
The machines were opened, tampered with and perfectly resealed, said Dr Brenner, "so that it was impossible to tell even for someone working at the factory that they had been tampered with." They were then exported to Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium.
An investigation launched by Mastercard International is understood to have discovered several of the corrupted machines at British branches of Asda and Sainsbury's.
In all, hundreds of devices in Britian and other affected countries had been copying the account details and pin numbers of thousands of credit and debit cards over the past nine months and transmitting the data via mobile phone networks to underworld electronic experts in Lahore, Pakistan.
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