Abstract
The rapid advancement of cutting-edge digital technologies has significantly contributed to the escalation of organised criminal activity, especially in the field of plastic currency financial fraud. Every day, new categories of cybercrimes are reported and each case requires a specialized forensic approach to achieve accurate results. This research study proposes an adaptive forensic approach, a practically applicable and legally admissible method, for the analysis of credit and debit card fraud and its encrypted application files. Our research presents a comprehensive approach for retrieving, decoding and analyzing data from portable skimmer devices and their related encrypted applications. Furthermore, it also introduces a novel algorithm, implemented using Python scripts, designed to decrypt and examine encrypted mobile application files while maintaining data integrity, enhancing the understanding of digital forensic processes in financial fraud investigations. The precise 97.86% accuracy rate in retrieving data from the portable skimmer device and its connected native application, as well as the 100% success rate in decoding encrypted files, proves that our approach outperforms the conventional methods in terms of flexibility, adaptability and efficacy. The result of the examination revealed the entire modus operandi and helped the investigators and the law enforcement agencies to establish the fact. Future directions include developing an AI-based Integrated approach for automatic detection of encryption types and decoding measures.
Keywords: Credit and Debit Card Fraud, Cybercrime, Encrypted Files, Portable Skimmer, Python Script.