The Durban High Court has dismissed a suit against Diners Club by a businessman who claimed R600 000 had been taken from his account without his knowledge.
KwaZulu-Natal newspaper The Mercury reports that High Court judge Philip Levinsohn issued punitive costs against the businessman, Anil Singh, to the tune of R5 million.
The case attracted attention when some of the hearings took place in London in camera as security experts from Diners Club and US-bank Citibank gave testimony in secret so as not to divulge details of the operations and security aspects of the credit cards.
The case centred on what is described as "phantom withdrawals" totalling 190 instances made during 2000, and the Durban Supreme Court requested expert witnesses from the UK to provide testimony.
Two British researchers, Mike Bond and Piotr Zielinski, based at Cambridge University, discovered that - despite endless security controls - a bank insider could crack a cashpoint card`s PIN on an internal bank network in an average of 15 tries, rather than the 5 000 tries that the ATM networks claim.
According to the researchers` findings, this meant that someone with inside knowledge could easily grab several millions in any currency in a short time. It also placed a question mark over the security of the ATM networks.
However, these claims were disputed and proved unfounded in the secret testimony provided by Diners Club and Citibank experts, who claimed the PINs were inviolate and that Singh must have given his numbers to someone else.
Citibank runs the processing systems for Diners Club in the UK.
Judge Levinsohn found it highly probable that Singh had given his card to syndicate members intent on defrauding the financial institution.
Singh claimed he had not given his PIN to anyone else and that he had been in Durban when the withdrawals had been made.
Diners Club SA is controlled by Standard Bank, which issued a statement saying the finding "confirms that the system of PINs for customers` credit and ATM cards is secure and continues to provide the strong protection to customers that it was designed to do".
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