Napa victims of recent debit card theft are not alone.

Similar cases of this type of theft have unfurled across the world with increasing pace, authorities said. And the crooks have gotten more ingenious at siphoning out debit card information from anywhere along its path from the time of the purchase to when it is transmitted to a central computer server.

There have also been widespread reports of fraud in Australia, Canada, including in Manitoba, British Columbia and  Montreal among other places.  The Australian investigators have been working with police worldwide in attempting to stem the tide. But officials couldn’t say, however, if some of those investigators were in the United States.

Debit card fraud has been around for as long as the technology has been available, but there has been a spike in the crime in the past 18 months, said Avivah Litan, an analyst for the Connecticut-based Gartner Inc., a technology and research advisory company.

“That’s their favorite fraud because they get cash immediately,” she said.

Recently, the crime has hit close to home, affecting more than 50 customers of Hancock Fabrics. Victims saw hundreds of dollars vanish from their accounts over a weekend in October.

The crooks made ATM withdrawals and debit card purchases across the Bay Area.

Napa Police Detective Mike Walund declined to comment on how exactly the crooks pulled off the Hancock scam.

Meanwhile, Hancock customers in Sacramento and in two cities in Wisconsin made similar reports. Officials in Australia are investigating fraud that occurred since Oct. 5 after thieves infiltrated  debit card machines at McDonald’s restaurants in Perth on Australia’s west coast.

So far, the banks have reported losses of more than 4 million Australian dollars — worth $3.67 million in U.S. currency — from more than 3,500 customers, said Western Australian Police Sgt. Graham Clifford.

Australia has launched a multi-agency investigation into the crime.

Officials there say the thieves work in one of two ways. They install something over the card insert slot, which records data from the card’s magnetic strip. Or they put a false panel at the top of an ATM with a small camera that records a person’s pin number, according to a statement from Western Australia police.

Scam artists need to distract a clerk for only a few seconds to make the switch. Then they harvest the information remotely.

Once they have the debit card information, they overlay it onto the magnetic strips of other cards.

“They may be using it themselves or selling it to other crooks,” Clifford said.

Both the local and international cases showcase the various ways thieves work.

Litan said skimming devices at the point of sale are common. Some will also hack into the main system and harvest pin numbers.

Crooks obtain PINs with a device that keeps track of a victim’s key strokes, she said. Or they harvest the data on the store’s server before it goes to the processor.

It’s a complex network of criminals working to steal the data.

“(The) criminals are very well organized so they are a criminal ring,” she said.