There “astonishment”this is the word that comes back into the mouth of Françoise*, 78 years old, still shaken by the scam she suffered with her husband. Monday April 29, the retired couple from Périgueux went to refuel as usual at the Privilège service station, on the outskirts of the town. “My husband puts his card in, he dials his code, and when he wants to get the card back: impossible.”
“The card was recovered by someone, who had both the card and the code since he used it to withdraw almost €3,000 from an ATM, in less than 20 minutes”, says the septuagenarian. By inserting the card into the reader to pay at the station, her husband feels that he is having trouble getting her into the machine. He dials his code.
The so-called “Marseille collar” scam?
The station does not have a pump attendant, only automatic credit card cash registers. Unable to get the card out, the couple leaves to seek help from employees of the nearby Leclerc drive : “As I passed by, my husband noticed a young man leaning against the pharmacy, who seemed to be watching us”Françoise remembers.
Was the couple the victim of what we call, in police language, the “Marseille collar” ? A plastic strip that blocks the card in the machine, which the crooks come to collect when the user leaves. Often, an accomplice who supposedly came to help the victim memorizes his code by asking him to redo it several times.
The station is “monitored daily”
The couple objected and went to the police to file a complaint, but it was too late. The crooks collected the card and went to the first ATM that came along, withdrawing everything they could before the bank deactivated the card: 3,000 euros. As is often the case, the scam took place on a Monday, the day the banks were closed.
The Périgueux police station is investigating the case, but according to our information, no other victims have yet come forward. When contacted, the owner of the Leclerc service station indicated that he had the payment terminals checked by his maintenance company: “There are no anomalies in our payment systems at Privilège station. Everything is checked daily and there are cameras 24 hours a day”. According to him, the couple was probably the victim of a scammer who saw them dial their code several times and who, pretending to help them, stole the card from them, without any hacking of the payment systems.
*The first name has been changed
