TWO Romanians who were involved in a scam to clone bank cards by fitting a false front to a cash machine in Alcester have been jailed for three years.

Dorel Oprisoni and Edward Dobos, both 25, of Kenwood Road, Bordesley Green, Birmingham, pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to conspiring to steal from bank cash machines.

Prosecutor David Jones said: "This case involves the cloning of bank cards and customers' details. It is very widespread and is a very serious problem.

"The kits which are involved cost £6,000 but once in use, they can generate a large amount of money because people do not realise their accounts are being milked."

He said the people responsible buy or make equipment which includes a complete fascia to fit over the front of ATM cash machines, and which looks like the original ATM.

But inside the false fascia is a device which reads the magnetic information from any card put into it and feeds that information back to a computer in a car parked nearby.

The scam requires the criminals to target a well-lit cash machine so that a specially-positioned camera can record the customer's pin number as it is entered.

The information from the card is used to create a cloned card, often using a mobile top-up card and that can then be used, together with the pin number, to get cash from machines or to buy goods from shops or over the internet.

Mr Jones said the false fascias are so realistic it is almost impossible for innocent customers to spot that they are fake and therefore to avoid using them.

But he offered the tip: "People can, if they have any fear, put their hand above the key plate when putting in their numbers so if there is a camera its view, is blocked.

"There is nothing one can do about the magnetic strip being read if there is a false fascia but it makes it more difficult for any cloned card to be used."

Oprisoni and Dobos were caught after they and two other Romanians, including Dobos's cousin James, drove in two cars to the HSBC in Alcester where they fitted a false fascia to the bank's cash machine.

But two local people were suspicious about what they were doing and contacted the police.

Officers arrived and arrested one man, but Oprisoni and Dobos were then pointed out to them and as the officers chased and caught them, the other man managed to escape.

In a Peugoet car parked nearby the police found the equipment to which card details would have been transmitted and back at the house in Kenwood Road was a laptop computer which was used to produce cloned cards.

Oprisoni claimed it was only the second time he had been involved and that he had got £400 from the previous occasion, while Dobos said it was his cousin who had attached the false fascia and that his role was to keep a lookout.

Dobos, who had £500 on him, said he and Oprisoni and the other two men, who have not been caught, would get 15 per cent each of anything they made and40 per cent would go to the people from whom they had got the equipment.

DC Alexander Wade said the equipment the police seized when the defendants were arrested contained thousands of credit card numbers, both from this country and abroad, and the laptop computer had 400 pages of credit card details.

Sarah Dobbs, for Dobos, said it could not be assumed that he and Oprisoni were responsible for those because it was not their equipment, but had been provided by others.

She and Robert Hodgkinson, for Oprisoni, both said the defendants were not the prime movers behind the use of the cloning equipment.

Jailing the men and recommending they be deported after serving their sentences, Judge Richard Griffith-Jones, who ordered Dobos to pay £500 costs, said: "This type of offence, I conclude, is prevalent.

"That does not mean I sentence these defendants for having been involved any more generally than they admit but it is necessary to deter criminals from believing that the large rewards which are in prospect from this type of crime do not carry the risk of fairly substantial sentences."