TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Indonesia has apparently became a safe haven for cyber banking crimes; skimming in particular. In fact, one third of skimming cases worldwide happened in Indonesia.

"In the last 3 years, there were 5,500 cases of skimming in the world. A total of 1,549 cases occurred in Indonesia," Brig. Gen. Victor E. Simanjuntak, Polri director of economic crime and special criminal investigation, said on Thursday, July 2.

Skimming is an act of duplicating data and information contained in an ATM card magnetic stripe. Victor said the rampant case of this type of crime in Indonesia is the result of Indonesian inadequate security system.

"Security system in Indonesia is still not well," he admitted.

Seeing the large number of skimming cases in Indonesia, seven EU police representatives came to discuss the international crime with the Indonesian police. The epresentatives came from Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, and Romania.

"We will cooperate and exchange information on the skimming offender," said Habenicht Jozsef, chairman of the European Union police representative for cybercrime.

The EU Police said that one of the efforts to lower the rate skimming is by using a Customer Identification Program (CIP), and limit the use of ATM overseas. When bringing an ATM card overseas, customers must a make sure they have reported it to their banks before using it in the destination country.

The police recently apprehended six Malaysians for stealing money from ATMs by means of card skimming. The criminals stole money from BCA's 112 customer accounts in Jakarta and Bandung. The total is more than Rp1.25 billion.

MITRA TARIGAN