Subject: Boiling FrogCards Friday March 10 10:07 AM ET Internet Pirate Code Sparks Bank Card Alert By Catherine Bremer PARIS (Reuters) - France prepared for a wave of petty bank card fraud after officials admitted on Friday that a trick posted on the Internet showing how to forge cards could work. The security-code busting formula, posted anonymously on the Internet, did not put people's bank accounts at risk of being emptied, the Cartes Bancaires interbank payment system group said. But it could be used to make cards for transactions such as buying train tickets, paying parking meters or toll booths, Cartes Bancaires spokesman Herve de Lacotte told Reuters. ``For the first time in 10 years, a lock has been sprung,'' he said. ``But springing a lock will not necessarily open the door and let you in. There is a theoretical risk of fraud but the problem concerns banks, not consumers or shops,'' he said. Newspapers leapt on the story, quoting experts as saying the complex 96-digit code could be used to forge three in four of France's 34 million bank cards. Headlines like ``Chip card secret out'' left anyone with a bank card wondering whether their money was safe and triggered a furious response from consumer groups. ``Consumers have been paying for bank cards that aren't even secure. They've been cheated and lied to,'' said Eric April, Secretary-General of the AFOC consumer group. However, Lacotte said the scare stories were over-the-top. Despite claims to the contrary, he said, extra security measures meant cards made with the stolen code could not be used in cash dispensers, to make shop purchases or for expensive goods. Cards issued since last autumn had added security which meant the pirate formula would not work for them, he added. SCSSI, the government body in charge of information security systems, urged banks to replace older cards with updated ones. ``Banks must launch a large-scale operation fast to improve chip cards, which will mean replacing millions of cards and card readers,'' SCSSI chief Jean-Louis Desvignes told the Paris daily Liberation. Computer whizzkid Serge Humpich, who set alarm bells ringing when he first cracked the algorithm three years ago, said that, armed with a chip card kit which can be bought for around $370, pirates could be turning out false bank cards within weeks. ``Decrypting the code was easy enough. A few weeks from now dozens of false cards are going to appear,'' he told Liberation. Humpich, who was landed with a 10-month suspended prison term for discovering the trick, claimed at the time it could have earned him $2,000 in cash every 15 minutes as well as countless holidays and goods paid for by card.
