A 40-YEAR-OLD woman from Twickenham wants to warn others about criminals operating on the high street following her bank account being cleared of all funds after a cash point retained her card.

The woman, who lives and works in Twickenham and did not wish to be named, said that when she finished work at 7pm last Thursday she went to the NatWest cash machine in King Street to withdraw some cash.

There were two machines but one of them was out of service. Putting her card into the functioning machine, she requested £30. She said: "It started making a very strange noise and a message came up on the screen which said ‘Sorry this cash point is out of service’ and it swallowed my card."

She waited five minutes but nothing happened. On Friday morning she phoned NatWest, who said her card was not in the machine. She explained to them that one machine had been out of order, so she used the second. They told her to contact Abbey National where her account is held. Abbey National told her that her account had been emptied from their King Street branch on Thursday evening and when she explained the situation, they told her to phone the police.

They told her it was a fraud known as the ‘Lebanese Loop’. Abbey National told her they would probably refund her the full amount of money lost once they had established that the transaction was fraudulent.

A spokesman for Twickenham Police said the "Lebanese Loop" suspects were caught on camera in October placing a device into a cash point machine which would sabotage a transaction telling the customer that the machine was out of service.

The card would then be retrieved by such criminals who had already obtained the pin number of the victim by looking over their shoulder. He said that in this case they would not be investigating the incident last Thursday further due to a lack of leads, but: "this does not mean we will not investigate should any more evidence come to light."