Subject: twisted little fiddler
Friday February 25 2:11 PM ET
Frenchman Sentenced in Card Fraud Case
PARIS (Reuters) - A French computer scientist who found a way to fool cash machines
into
giving him $2,000 every 15 minutes was given a 10-month suspended prison term Friday.
Serge Humpich, who tried to sell his discovery to others rather than use it himself
to buy
goods, was found guilty by a Paris court of forgery and fraudulent access to an
automated data
system.
Humpich, 36, told the court he had not been looking to steal when he cracked an
algorithm
enabling communication between bank cards and machines, thus infiltrating France's
Cartes
Bancaires interbank payments system.
Humpich, who is appealing against the decision, found a way to have his home-made
smart
card answer ``yes'' whenever a machine asked it if he had typed in the correct PIN
code.
``It was crazy -- I could communicate with the central computer and let myself in via
any
network. (I was) the only person in the world that could take out 15,000 francs
($2,238) every
quarter of an hour and buy absolutely everything I wanted,'' Humpich told Friday's
Liberation
newspaper.
Humpich never profited from his discovery. Instead he approached Cartes Bancaires
through a
lawyer and offered to sell them his secret.
But the company rejected his offer and alerted the Interior Ministry. He was arrested
last
September and fired from his job as a computer engineer.
His lawyer said the discovery had advanced science. But the company's lawyer called
Humpich a ``twisted little fiddler.''
