Category Archives: Cloning

Interrogations of the eight men, including six waiters, who were arrested by the Bandra police for allegedly a running credit card/debit card cloning racket in Mumbai, Pune and Thane has revealed that the eight skimmers that were found with the accused were ordered online. Card skimmers are small in size, and can fit in the palm of a hand.

The waiters, on occasions, kept the skimmer right below the payment machine. They then swiped the card in such a manner, that it swiped on the payment machine as well as the skimmer below it, making difficult for the customer to make out. They then observed them as they punched the four digit pin number on the keypad of the payment machine, and memorised it.

The police said on most occasions the customers handed over their credit card and debit cards along with the pin code, making it easy for the waiters to steal their data.

The waiters hid the skimmer in their shirt pockets or inside their shirt. An official said even if the customer sees a skimmer in the waiters hand, he wouldnt be able to make out what it was.

An official said three of the waiters worked at a restaurant called Persian Durbar in Sakinaka, but they had associates working at other hotels in Andheri, including Metro hotel.

Read: Three waiters arrested in Mumbai for fraud and cloning ATM cards

One of the accused made over 25 lakh from the racket:

The Bandra police investigating the racket said one of the accused, who worked as a waiter, made Rs1 lakh within few months and said his handler, who is also under arrest, made over Rs25 lakh since 2016 when they started stealing card data using skimmers.

A police source said, They stole data of 1,026 customers having bank accounts in 96 different banks, including eight major banks.

The list we procured from one of the banks shows they managed to withdraw anywhere between Rs20,000 to Rs40,000 from one account. Even as one of the accused said his handler made over Rs25 lakh, we suspect the total stolen amount could be much higher, added the official.

Read: Card cloning racket: Mumbai gang steals debit, credit card data from 1,000 customers of 96 banks

Incidentally, only two banks have shared their customer data with the Bandra police, which has helped them ascertain names of the victims whose money has been withdrawn by the accused. Till now, over 25 FIRs have been registered across Mumbai, Pune and Thane.

However, as banks are taking a lot of time to respond to our emails, our work of identifying victims based on their data and getting the FIRs registered is getting delayed. If more and more cases are registered we could ensure that the accused do not get bail and stay in jail, added a police source on condition of anonymity.

One of the arrested accused was also arrested in 2015 by the BKC cyber police for a card cloning case, but he got out on bail and continued the scam, the police added.

The racket was unearthed last month after an FIR was registered with Bandra police by Citi bank in May.

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Mumbaiites beware, your waiter might be cloning your card while you make payment at a hotel - Hindustan Times

The investigation into a card cloning racket, unearthed by the Bandra police this month, has revealed that the racketeers allegedly paid Rs1,000 to each waiter for sharing details,including password, of each debit or credit card of customers.

The police last week arrested six waiters who worked at restaurants in Mumbai, Pune and Thane and two ITexperts. The waiter allegedly stole credit and debit card details of 1,028 customers. Officials said IT professionals had contacted the waiters through an acquaintance in the hotel management industry.

Pandit Thackeray, senior inspector of Bandra police station, confirmed that each waiter was paid Rs1,000 for each card.

By selling credit and debit card details, each waiter earned around Rs50,000 per month, according to an officer.

Thackeray added that the duped customers had accounts in 108 banks. The police have recovered 106 skimmers devices used to obtain card details from the eight men. The accused men made these devices from the scratch and uploaded the stolen data on empty cards. The accused then withdrew money from the customers account using these cloned cards. The waiters in the beginning copied details of one or two card. As they grew confident, they began cloning 40 to 50 cards in a month, added the police officer.

Three of these waiters worked at a restaurant at Sakinaka in Andheri (East). The unsuspecting customers handed over their cards and pin code to the waiters who secretly swiped them on the skimmers. In some cases, they clandestinely saw customers punching in card pin code on the swipe machine.

The Bandra police received a complaint from Citi Bank in May which led to the racket. Apart from the 106 skimmers, the police seized a laptop and a unique software used to clone cards. The police have also seized 50 cloned cards from the accused which are rewritable.

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Don't hand over your credit or debit card to waiters in Mumbai, some sell details for 1000 each - Hindustan Times

Photo by Flickr user Sean MacEntee

A recent weekend getaway with the family turned into a credit card cloning hassle for a Pendleton man. Luke Renner had taken his family to an amusement park, only to discover a few days later that two of his credit cards had been cloned.

My best guess that it probably - whatever happened happened there," Renner says.

Renner received a fraud alert from one of the banks to let him know that his personal credit card had been hacked. It was only after his business credit card was declined at two different stores that he realized it too had been cloned.

And then it occurred to me that one of the two cards that was compromised never left my wallet, he says.

Renner didn't take any chances. He and his wife closed their credit card accounts and got new cards. They also did some research on RFID or so-called "tap-to-pay" credit cards that you don't have to swipe or stick in a machine to use.

They have RFID blocking wallets, card sleeves that stick to your phone and these are just sort of barriers that create an electronic wall of some sort that keep those scanners from being able to retrieve the information off of the cards that are in your wallet, Renner says.

He's invested in a new wallet for himself and his wife got an RFID blocking sleeve for her cards.

Indianapolis Metro Police Sergeant Steve Walters says credit card fraud continues to escalate. Criminals use skimmers on ATMs and at gas pumps but, he says, they can also scan tap-to-pay credit cards without even touching them.

They can do a card reading right from the pocket of their pants and you have no idea. It could have been someone standing right behind you at the grocery store, Walters says.

He recommends setting up fraud alerts on all your credit cards and regularly - even daily - check your statements online.

Walters warns there may be more to worry about than just getting your credit card replaced.

Make sure in the next couple of weeks once you have had that account shut down, that you run a credit check on yourself to make sure individuals are not opening different accounts using your card information, he says.

Walters also recommends making a police report so they can help put a stop to credit card fraud.

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Fraud Expert: Credit Card Cloning Trend "Going Skyward" - WFYI

MUMBAI: The arrest of a 30-year-old college dropout from Byculla had helped the police unearth a major card cloning racket and crack 14 cases three in Bandra and the rest in Thane and Pune. Till date, eight men have been arrested and two kignpins are on the run. Police said the rackeeters, with the help of six hotel waite-rs, stole debit/credit card details of 1,000 people from 96 banks, cloned cards and withdrew money from unmanned ATM kiosks. On June 18 night, police sub-inspector Bhimsen Gaikwad noticed a suspicious-looking man inside an ATM kiosk on Carter Road in Bandra (W). The man, Sayyed Masrafe, claimed he was trying to withdraw money, but Gaikwad found it was an expired card. "During questioning, we learnt that he was on bail after being arrested in another card fraud case," said a police officer. "We searched Masrafe's house and found a cloning app on his laptop, skimmers, internet dongle, a coding and decoding machine to make magnetic strips and 50 forged debit cards. The arrested waiters were given skimmers to swipe customers' cards, while Masrafe would clone the cards and withdraw money from ATMs."

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Youth's arrest unearthed card cloning fraud - Times of India

New DNA-based LASSO molecule probe can bind target genome regions for functional cloning and analysis.Image credit: Jennifer E. Fairman/Johns Hopkins UniversityDiscovering the function of a gene requires cloning a DNA sequence and expressing it. Until now, this was performed on a one-gene-at-a-time basis, causing a bottleneck. Scientists atRutgers University-New Brunswickin collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Medical School have invented a technology to clone thousands of genes simultaneously and create massive libraries of proteins from DNA samples, potentially ushering in a new era of functional genomics.

We think that the rapid, affordable, and high-throughput cloning of proteins and other genetic elements will greatly accelerate biological research to discover functions of molecules encoded by genomes and match the pace at which new genome sequencing data is coming out, saidBiju Parekkadan, an associate professor in theDepartment of Biomedical Engineeringat Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

In a study published online June 26in the journalNature Biomedical Engineering, the researchers showed that their technologyLASSO (long-adapter single-strand oligonucleotide) probescan capture and clone thousands of long DNA fragments at once.

As a proof-of-concept, the researchers cloned more than 3,000 DNA fragments fromE. coli bacteria, commonly used as a model organism with a catalogued genome sequence available.

We captured about 95 percent of the gene targets we set out to capture, many of which were very large in DNA length, which has been challenging in the past, Parekkadan said. I think there will certainly be more improvements over time.

They can now take a genome sequence (or many of them) and make a protein library for screening with unprecedented speed, cost-effectiveness and precision, allowing rapid discovery of potentially beneficial biomolecules from a genome.

In conducting their research, they coincidentally solved a longstanding problem in the genome sequencing field. When it comes togenetic sequencingof individual genomes, todays gold standard is to sequence small pieces of DNA one by one and overlay them to map out the full genome code. But short reads can be hard to interpret during the overlaying process and there hasnt been a way to sequence long fragments of DNA in a targeted and more efficient way. LASSO probes can do just this, capturing DNA targets of more than 1,000 base pairs in length where the current format captures about 100 base pairs.

The team also reported the capture and cloning of the first protein library, or suite of proteins, from a human microbiome sample. Shedding light on thehuman microbiomeat a molecular level is a first step toward improving precision medicine efforts that affect the microbial communities that colonize our gut, skin, and lungs, Parekkadan added.Precision medicine requires a deep and functional understanding, at a molecular level, of the drivers of healthy and disease-forming microbiota.

Today, the pharmaceutical industry screens synthetic chemical libraries of thousands of molecules to find one that may have a medicinal effect, said Parekkadan, who joined RutgersSchool of Engineeringin January.

Our vision is to apply the same approach but rapidly screen non-synthetic, biological or natural molecules cloned from human or other genomes, including those of plants, animals and microbes, he said. This could transform pharmaceutical drug discovery into biopharmaceutical drug discovery with much more effort.

The next phase, which is underway, is to improve the cloning process, build libraries and discover therapeutic proteins found in our genomes, Parekkadan said.

Other authors include Lorenzo Tosi, Viswanadham Sridhara, Yunlong Yang, Dongli Guan, and Polina Shpilker of Harvard Medical School; Nicola Segata of the University of Trento in Trento, Italy; and H. Benjamin Larman of Johns Hopkins University.

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Cloning Thousands of Genes for Massive Protein Libraries - Lab Manager Magazine

Queer musician Yves Tumor's new film, for the frenetic track "Broke In," is a chilling exploration of cloning, biohacking, and being buried alive. For the project, Tumor tapped Berlin filmmakers Sam Dye and Bliss Resting to direct, with lyrics by UK musician Oxhy.

Its about feeling crushed by the city of London, walking around the streets and feeling no escape, feeling like the city youre from wants you out, Oxhy told Dazed. Needing release, but at the same time constantly remembering the violence that the desire for freedom as a male has meant, historically and currently.

Much of the film sees Oxhy covered in dirt, with just his eyes and his muddy teeth visible. The result is a highly jarring, unsettling film that includes images of great violence and oppression.

Oxhy is the real star of this film, said Dye and Resting.We put him through so much, its fantastic to have such dedicated people to work with. Always a star, no matter how much hes choking.

Tumor's debut album,Serpent Music, came out last year, and impressed us with its experimental, atmospheric approach to creating a queer soundscape. Tumor is based in Turin, Italy, and an affiliate of another highly important LGBTQ musician, Mykki Blanco.

Take a look at the video, below:

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Yves Tumor's New Music Video is a Creepy Story of Cloning & Biohacking - Out Magazine

Anew technology can clone thousands of genes at once and compile libraries of proteins from DNA samples, potentially speeding up the search for new drugs.

Discovering the function of a gene requires cloning a DNA sequence and expressing it. Until now, this was performed on a one-gene-at-a-time basis, causing a bottleneck.

We think that the rapid, affordable, and high-throughput cloning of proteins and other genetic elements will greatly accelerate biological research to discover functions of molecules encoded by genomes and match the pace at which new genome sequencing data is coming out, says Biju Parekkadan, an associate professor in the biomedical engineering Department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

In a study published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, the researchers show that their technologyLASSO (long-adapter single-strand oligonucleotide) probescan capture and clone thousands of long DNA fragments at once.

As a proof-of-concept, the researchers cloned more than 3,000 DNA fragments from E. coli bacteria, commonly used as a model organism with a catalogued genome sequence available.

We captured about 95 percent of the gene targets we set out to capture, many of which were very large in DNA length, which has been challenging in the past, Parekkadan says. I think there will certainly be more improvements over time.

They can now take a genome sequence (or many of them) and make a protein library for screening with unprecedented speed, cost-effectiveness, and precision, allowing rapid discovery of potentially beneficial biomolecules from a genome.

In conducting their research, they coincidentally solved a longstanding problem in the genome sequencing field.

When it comes to genetic sequencing of individual genomes, todays gold standard is to sequence small pieces of DNA one by one and overlay them to map out the full genome code. But short reads can be hard to interpret during the overlaying process and there hasnt been a way to sequence long fragments of DNA in a targeted and more efficient way.

LASSO probes can do just this, capturing DNA targets of more than 1,000 base pairs in length where the current format captures about 100 base pairs.

The team also reported the capture and cloning of the first protein library, or suite of proteins, from a human microbiome sample. Shedding light on the human microbiome at a molecular level is a first step toward improving precision medicine efforts that affect the microbial communities that colonize our gut, skin, and lungs, Parekkadan adds. Precision medicine requires a deep and functional understanding, at a molecular level, of the drivers of healthy and disease-forming microbiota.

Today, the pharmaceutical industry screens synthetic chemical libraries of thousands of molecules to find one that may have a medicinal effect, says Parekkadan.

Our vision is to apply the same approach but rapidly screen non-synthetic, biological, or natural molecules cloned from human or other genomes, including those of plants, animals, and microbes, he says. This could transform pharmaceutical drug discovery into biopharmaceutical drug discovery with much more effort.

The next phase, which is underway, is to improve the cloning process, build libraries, and discover therapeutic proteins found in our genomes, Parekkadan says.

Additional authors are from Harvard Medical School; the University of Trento in Trento, Italy; and Johns Hopkins University.

Source: Rutgers University

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To find new drugs, make 'libraries' from DNA - Futurity: Research News

Boston Business Journal

This powerful new tool for cloning genes could speed up drug discovery Boston Business Journal The technology "makes a 20,000-piece puzzle look like a 1,000-piece puzzle, said one of the researchers, Biju Parekkadan, a faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital. Subscribe to get the full story. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Subscribe to ...

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This powerful new tool for cloning genes could speed up drug discovery - Boston Business Journal

The Bandra police recently arrested three more waiters working for a hotel in Sakinaka for allegedly using skimmers to steal credit and debit card details of their customers to cheat them later. With this, the total number of arrested accused in the case reached eight.

DCP, zone IX, Paramjit Dahiya said, Eight people, including six waiters, have been arrested. Eight skimmers and 50 ATM cloned cards have been seized.

Apart from Bandra police in Mumbai, FIRs have been registered in Thane and Pune districts for duping unsuspecting customers. According to Bandra police, the three waiters were working in Persian Durbar in Sakinaka area in Andheri east. Two other waiters one from Pune and another from Thane were also arrested. The unsuspecting customers coming over to the Sakinaka hotel not only handed over their credit card/debit card to the three waiters but also gave their PIN code to them.

The waiters swiped the card on the three skimmers that have been recovered from them. The stolen information was then used to clone cards with the help of a software and laptop, said detection officer, sub inspector Bhimsen Gaikwad from Bandra police station. Santosh Shetty, general secretary of Association of Hotels and Restaurants (AHAR) having 8,000 hotel establishments as members in Mumbai told HT, We have put up sign boards at our hotels as well as we ask our waiters to go up to the table with the payment machine. We ask customers to swipe the card and enter the pin code with their own hands. In general, customers should desist from handing over their card and pin while making payment at anyplace.

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Three waiters arrested in Mumbai for fraud and cloning ATM cards ... - Hindustan Times

Published time: 24 Jun, 2017 08:49 Edited time: 24 Jun, 2017 10:16

Lab-produced dogs cloned from bio material taken from the two best representatives of the Yakutian Laika species have arrived in Russia from South Korea for genetic research. One met its original mother as a Ruptly crew filmed the moment.

The puppies, which were cloned by South Koreas Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, one of the worlds leading dog cloning laboratories, arrived in Yakutsk, the capital of Siberias Yakutia Republic, on Friday. The research was led by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk and his team.

The scientists succeeded in cloning the Yakutian Laikas, a type of hunting dog from Northern Russia and Russian Siberia, from a 12-year-old male and a 6-year-old female.

One of cloned puppies is a two-month-old girl named Kyrachana, which means beautiful in the Yakutian language. Another is a 3-month-old boy named Belekh, which means present.

Ruptly visited the farm where Kyrachana is now living when she met her original mother for the first time.

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I cant really believe that it [the puppy] is a clone. If you look at the original, you can see that they both look alike,the dogs owner Dmitry said, adding that the puppy had been cloned from a part of the mother dogs ear.

The collaboration with the South Korean scientific laboratory is aimed at saving the original Yukutian Laika breed, whose population has seen drastic decline over past decades due to cross-breeding.

The canines were cloned in the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which is focused on advanced biotechnology for industrial and biomedical applications using animal cloning and pluripotent stem cells combined with transgenic technology, the companys website says.

However, not all of the cloned dogs are pets. The laboratory has replicated the best military and police dogs to assist the South Korean police, and many cloned dogs currently work in police forces in the US and China.

In November of 2016, the company sent three cloned Belgian Malinois to join police forces in Yakutsk.

Animal cloning is not allowed everywhere in the world. In 2015, the EU Parliament banned the cloning of animals, as well as importing their descendants.

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Puppies cloned from ears arrive in Russia for genetic research ... - RT