Credit card of PayPal PRESIDENT cloned by UK crooks

Tripping the hack scam-plastic

PayPal president's credit card got hacked on a UK visit, the victim revealed on Twitter.

David Marcus said that an unidentified criminal used a skimming device and his credit card was cloned before "tons" of fraudulent transaction were made.

The senior executive of the eBay-owned payment processing firm made sure to score a marketing point from the whole unhappy incident, pointing out that if the merchant had accepted PayPal the fraud wouldn't have been possible in the way it apparently happened.

PayPal Here would have masked the card number, thereby frustrating the cloning operation. The technology, which involves using a Bluetooth peripheral to handle payment, was introduced to the UK last year.

Marcus reported the incident in a series of updates to his personal (verified) Twitter account on Monday. "My card (with EMV chip) got skimmed while in the UK. Ton of fraudulent txns. Wouldn't have happened if merchant accepted PayPal," he wrote.

The compromised card came with an EMV chip, but Marcus blamed the fraud on someone skimming the mag stripe and extracting sensitive data that way rather the compromising the chip on his payment card.

Public figures are no more immune to plastic fraud than the rest of us. Previous celebrity victims of credit card and banking fraud include Ben Bernanke, former US Federal Reserve Board chairman, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy, among others. ®