Skimming Device Located on Woburn ATM

The following is an excerpt from the Woburn Police Department log. Please note that this is a sampling of activity in the log, not a complete account.

Featured Incident

On Sunday, Nov. 10, police were called to Montvale Ave. where a Bank of America employee reported possibly locating a skimming device on their ATM.

A skimming device is placed on an ATM card readers illegally in an effort to gain access to bank accounts.

Officer were met by the calling party, a security company, who said that at 2:54 p.m. his company received a "skim fault" alert. When he arrived, he found what appeared to be a skimming device over the slot where a customer would put their card into the machine.

Police asked the man when they first started receiving trouble from the ATM, and he said the previous night a technician was called out to address a "cash acceptor fault."

The man was on scene for about an hour but was unable to address the problem. Then this morning, a second man arrived to address the problem but stated that it was worked and he conducted a transaction.

According to the security company, the technician did not notice the skimmer at the time.

The reporting party said that when he arrived on scene at the bank, a suspicious man approached him and asked him, "Is there a problem?" According to the man, he felt that was suspicious so he wrote the license plate of the vehicle the suspicious man got into.

Police processed the scene and after taking pictures they removed the skimmer and placed it into a property bag.