A small number of Steinbach Credit Union members are among a group of people who've had their bank cards cancelled after their accounts were illegally accessed over the weekend.

According to SCU Chief Executive Officer Glenn Friesen (inset, right), the accounts were hit via stolen, or skimmed, bank cards.  Friesen says the cards were scanned in Winnipeg at four different retailers and then copied and used to take money from accounts by thieves in Malaysia.  Friesen adds that despite numerous upgrades at financial institutions and at retailers, 'skimming' is still a big problem but thankfully, SCU has security measures in place to limit the damage.

"We do have software running in the backend that notifies us if anything unusual happens with a card or an account.  We get notified and can also pinpoint where the compromise occurred.  We immediately start phoning our members and cancelling their cards."

The unfortunate part, Friesen says, is the inconvenience something like this causes customers.

"They will be reimbursed for any money withdrawn from their account, 100% - so, there are no issues with us fully reimbursing them.  However, there is the inconvenience of having to come into a branch and get a new member card."


With every financial institution now issuing chip cards to their customers, the question is: how does something like this continue to happen?  Friesen says he doesn't want to point the finger in any particular direction but he says thieves are targeting retailers who haven't upgraded their debit systems.

"If a retailer has not converted to chip technology, they still have the old swipe technology, those machines can be compromised.  Unfortunately, this past weekend, the Easter weekend, that happened to some of our members."

As mentioned, the skimming occurred at four different retailers in Winnipeg.  Due to privacy regulations, Friesen says the names of those retailers cannot be released, but admits having the names of the retailers published would certainly put pressure on them to upgrade their equipment - or face losing a good number of customers.  The good news is a large number of retailers have already made the switch to allow chip cards and all retailers will have to be upgraded by 2015.

"80% of retailers are now chip-compliant so thieves have fewer places to go."

Friesen points out that almost all financial institutions are using the latest technology to try and prevent skimming from occurring.

"The software that we've developed catches these things much quicker today than it did five years ago.  We almost know instantaneously how many cards and which cards are affected, and we begin cancelling those cards immediately.  So, the dollar figure has shrunk significantly in the last 3-4 years and we're hoping to get it down to zero."

Friesen says if members have any questions about card security or account security in general, they can contact the Credit Union at any time.