Court sides with Halifax in chip card clone case

04 June 2009 | 11301 views | 3 atm

A UK judge has ruled in favour of high street bank Halifax in the country's first ever phantom withdrawal lawsuit involving a chip card.

The case was brought by customer Alain Job who claimed that fraudsters cloned his chip-based card and withdrew £2100 from his account at ATMs.

The judge based his ruling on printouts from log files to show that Job's real card had been used for the transactions and that the machine had not defaulted to reading mag-stripe data.

The suit was filed after two critical pieces of evidence once held by Halifax were destroyed, including the original ATM card and the Authorisation Request Cryptogram that could have proved that the card's chip had been read and authenticated by the machine.

The plaintiff says he is studying the judgment before deciding whether to appeal the ruling.

Comments: (3)

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Marite Ferrero - CardSwitch Technology - London | 04 June, 2009, 17:35

Interesting to know what was in this printout that enabled the judge to ascertain that the real card was used.

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Elton Cane - Independent - Brisbane | 05 June, 2009, 08:50

The full text of the judgement, including details of the experts called by claimant an defendent, and the transaction records produced, can be found here: http://www.alikelman.com/jobhbos.pdf

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David Griffiths - gryffle - Hertford | 05 June, 2009, 11:07

So ... I have just spent the last hour looking at the stuff from the court. I am completely with Marite on this, I would dearly love to see what the Halifax produced that enabled the judge to accept that they had proven their case.

The evidence as presented does seem to imply that Mr Jobs (or associate) did actually make the withdrawals, and I think for that, the correct resolution, in terms of who gets the cash, was reached. At this time, however, the Halifax have absolutely not proven their case (I am surprised the Cambridge "experts" haven't spotted the holes, but hey!); and the result could have been very different. The defence only needed to have asked the right questions ...!

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