Fraudster convicted of online banking thefts using… whatever the hell this thing is Brit cops have put away a fraudster who was using a bizarre homemade device to con people out of the contents of their bank accounts. London's Metropolitan Police said this week that 53-year-old Tony Muldowney-Colston (who also goes by Tony Colston-Hayter) has admitted to nine counts of possession of an article for use in …
Well, he's been sentenced to a spirit-crushing 20 months, so... including time spent on remand, he'll almost certainly be out again by late next summer. I'm sure he'll be a reformed character by then who's seen the error of his ways and will devote the rest of his days to charitable works, soppy poetry, and helping little old ladies across the road.
No-one else is convinced by the Jesus/devotional postcard in the top-left corner of his device?
Devotional postcard? Personally, I think it's the IKEA mirror that gives it away.
Well, I think it's details like that which distinguish a really great build, and after getting out he should tour Makerspaces demonstrating the thing. One of the finest examples of ... whatever the hell that is ... I've seen in some time.
Surely, there must be studies done on such things.
Yup. Criminals in religious nations where many judges, jurors and parole boards can be assumed to be religious readily profess a religion themselves. It doesn't always gain them some leniency, claiming that the blessings of Jesus/Allah/Buddha/Vishnu have helped them to turn their lives around, but it doesn't stop them from trying it on.
Pathetic sentence for a repeat offender.
£500,000 that they know about, and a likely 10 months in prison gives an hourly rate far beyond minimum wages! Assume an 18 hour "prison work day" and he'll be awake for about 5000 hours over ten months. So that's ~£100 an hour...
Crime clearly pays.
"great hourly rate?"
You don't know if any of the 500k was safely stashed away where he can get it later, nor if he managed to stash anything else away unknown from the police, so the best you can say is he has board and lodging free for 10 months. Otherwise, who knows?
>board and lodging free for 10 months
It does depends on the flexibility of his current (previous) living situation. Banks/landlords take a dim view to missing mortgage/rent payments. Just got to hope there is enough in the account so the direct debits don't bounce.
I was going to do a breakdown of how much it would save with no prior commitments, then got sad at the cost of living.
A chap from the local federal police used to show up at a local hacker conference and explain that when you get caught, they put you in jail with a roommate that is most likely there for longer and stole far less. Once he figures out he got years for a few hundred and you got the same for hundreds of thousands he will either be very angry or want to be your friend. If you can't teach him how to hack, he and his friends will find you when you get out and insist you help them using persuasive techniques they learned in jail.
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit.
"Pin sentries are not specific to any bank so I found out when I used a Barclays one with Nat-west and vice versa, certainly a security error on the banks part."
Why on earth is that a security error? This is by design, it is an open standard that is used by many banks in different countries. It means that if you have 6 different bank accounts then you don't need 6 different pin devices - less plastic waste. Also if you need to make a cash transfer you can borrow one from a friend - especially useful when travelling the world. It also means they are all secured (or insecured) to the same standard rather than having weaknesses in specific ones. They also wouldn't need to all be swapped out every time a card range is changed for a certain bank (which happens many times a year).
So, completely failing to see why it is a negative...
For the uninitiated, the device at the bottom left is similar to a Barclays PINSentry. Can be used to get access to your online bank account. Put your card in, type in your PIN and it generates an 8 digit one time code. That, together with your surname and online membership number gets you into your account.
So in terms of security it relies on something you have (the chip on your card), something you know (your PIN) and a couple of other bits of fixed information (your name and membership). I think if you log in from a different device another layer kicks in.
So why's he got a Barclays hardware dongle / mugger's PIN checker ?
1. As other commentariat noted they are not bank specific.
2. Barclays has the best quality ones. I have not seen one fail yet. HSBC - yes. Nationwide - yes, got two dead in my drawer. Barclay - no. I use a Barclay instead of the Nationwide one for my nationwide accounts.
This post has been deleted by its author
a disgruntled Radio Shack employee
Was there another sort?
Seriously, I built some pieces of quick-and-dirty kit from components purchased at Radio Shack back in the day. I recall a 555-based tone generator a friend and I breadboarded together and put in a plastic food container as a case. And around 1984 my father and I built a surge suppressor and power-line noise filter out of Radio Shack parts, based on a Steve Ciarcia "Circuit Cellar" article; I used that thing until a couple of years ago, when it finally started to get flaky.
It was pretty neat when you could go in the Radio Shack in your local suburban mall and buy simple ICs like the 555, discrete components, breadboards, cases, books of project plans... One of my local stores even had a tube (valve) tester on the floor up through the late 1980s.
--- I recall a 555-based tone generator a friend and I breadboarded together ---
Are you sure that wasn't a 556, for Dual Tone?
And that your muse didn't have a surname starting with 'W'?
OTOH, the harmonic content of simple 555-based tone generators made for their use as "tariff reduction devices" iffy.
Are you sure that wasn't a 556, for Dual Tone?
Nah, it was a 555. We were just messing about generating single tones. I think my friend hoped to eventually build a working blue box, but probably lost interest before he got that far.
And that your muse didn't have a surname starting with 'W'?
If you're referring to my reference to Steve Ciarcia - no, it was definitely Steve Ciarcia, of Byte magazine's "Circuit Cellar" column. (And later his own Circuit Cellar magazine.)
I suspect that had Mr Muldowney-Colston entered that construction for the Turner Prize, he could have made even more money legitimately.
He would however have needed was a bit of art-speak:
"I call it the Seduction of Capitalism. It is a manifestation of the discord caused by the juxtaposition of tradition, in the form of the religious image, with the brutal modernism and pursuit of Mammon symbolised by the card reader. The theme continues with the voice-changing electronics acting as a metaphor for the mixing and blurring of genders and identities. The wiring represents the complex interconnections of modern life, and is contrasted with the observer's own self image reflected in the mirror."
How does the mirror and holy postcard help with that?
What, you expect us to explain sympathetic electronics in a forum post?
OK, at a very high level: the mirror acts as a mundane-pass filter to suppress ghost and other supernatural activity, while the postcard serves as a holiness capacitor which conditions the aura of sincerity.
Its quite clearly a modern day enigma encoding device, all banks have a similar contraption on the back end of their infrastructure for decoding transactions, except theirs has a post-it note holder to write down the onetime keys. I understand from a source (only known to me) that this key piece of hardware caused TSB's melt-down when a piece of gaffer tape became unstuck.
As well as the high-tech heists against Barclays and Santander five years ago ( https://www.grahamcluley.com/bank-hackers-hardware/ ), Colston-Hayter is also infamous for handcuffing himself to Jonathan Ross live on air.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q93jq5xNOn8
(Beware, images of 1980s fashion)
"Yes, Commissioner Gordon, we've issued the boys with a utility belt loaded with Batspray, Batcuffs and a Batstungun.. the Batsignal has been upgraded with a zeon bulb... and the detectives have been issued with Dick Tracey watch radios"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
