The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey Page B

outflanked.
    "It's bad, all right," Nolan Wainwright agreed. "And these are only samples. I've four dozen more, intercepted after they'd been used successfully in retail outlets, restaurants, for airline tickets, liquor, other things. And all of them are the best counterfeits which have ever shown up." "Arrests?"
    "None so far. When people sense a phony card is being queried they walk out of a store, away from an airline counter, or whatever, just as happened a few minutes ago." He motioned toward the authorization room. "Besides, even when we do arrest some users it doesn't follow we'll be near the source of the cards; usually they're sold and resold carefully enough to cover a trail."
    Alex V andervoort picked up one of the fraudulent blue, green, and gold cards and turned it over. "The plastic seems an exact match too."
    "They're made from authentic plastic blanks that are stolen. They have to be, to be that good." The security chief went on, "We think we've traced the source of the cards themselves. Four months ago one of our suppliers had a break-in. The thieves got into the strong room where finished plastic sheets are stored. Three hundred sheets were missing."
    Vandervoort whistled softly. A single plastic sheet would produce sixty-six Keycharge credit cards. That meant, potentially, almost twenty thousand fraudulent cards.
    Wainwright said, "I did the arithmetic too." He motioned to the counterfeits on the desk. "This is the tip of an iceberg. Okay, so the phony cards we know about, or think we do, can mean ten million dollars' loss in charges before we pull them out of circulation. But what about others we haven't heard of yet? There could be ten times as many more." "I get the picture."
    Alex Vandervoort paced the small office as his thoughts took shape.
    He reflected: Ever since bank credit cards were introduced, all banks issuing them had been plagued by heavy loss through fraud. At first, entire mailbags of cards were stolen, their contents used for spending sprees by thieves at bank expense. Some mail shipments were hijacked and held for ransom. Banks paid the ransom money, knowing the cost would be far greater if cards were distributed through the underworld, and used. Ironically, in 1974 Pan American Airways was castigated by press and public after admitting it paid money to criminals for the return of large quantities of stolen ticket blanks. The airline's objective was to avoid enormous losses through misuse of the tickets. Yet unknown to Pan Am's critics, some of the nation's biggest banks had quietly been d oing the same thing for years.
    Eventually, mail theft of credit cards was reduced, but by then criminals had moved on to other, more ingenious schemes. Counterfeiting was one. The early counterfeit cards were crude and easily recognizable, but quality improved until now as Wainwright had shown it took an expert to detect the difference.
    As fast as any credit card security measure was devised, criminal cleverness would circumvent it or attack a vulnerability elsewhere. As an example, a new type credit card now being marketed used a "scrambled" photograph of the cardholder. To ordinary eyes the photo was an indistinguishable blur, but placed in a descrambling device it could be viewed clearly and the cardholder identified. At the moment the scheme looked promis sing, but Alex had not the least doubt that organized crime would soon find a way to duplicate the scrambled photos.
    Periodically, arrests and convictions of those using stolen or bogus credit cards were made, but these represented a small portion only of the total traffic. The main so far as banks were concerned, was a lack of investigative and enforcement people. There simply were not enough. Alex ceased his pacing.
    "These latest counterfeits," he queried, "is it likely that there's some kind of ring behind them?"
    "It's not only likely, it's a certainty. For the end product to be this good there has to be an organization. And it's got money