Police in Romania this week swooped in on 19 members of an alleged international ring of bank-card skimmers that's been active in Switzerland, Italy, France and the United States, according to local reports.
Romania's national Directorate for Countering Organized Crime staged 23 coordinated raids Tuesday, most of them in the city of Craiova, reports the Gazeta de Sud.
The police found fake ATM components, card readers, five luxury cars, lots of cash, 100 cloned cards, documents showing wire transfers, and at least one handgun.
The police had been secretly watching the gang for 9 months, and moved in after intercepting a package Tuesday containing 31 tiny circuit boards designed to surreptitiously intercept and store data from magstripe swipes.
Here's the police video from one of Tuesday's raids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl3LHWzHcbo
Romanian nationals have been sporadically popping up in ATM skimming busts around the world. In September, police in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County arrested 26-year-old George Puflene in the act of attaching a skimmer and PIN pad plate to a Citibank cash machine, where it would have recorded the magstripe data and secret codes of every customer using the ATM. Puflene and his crew had reportedly already plundered $70,000 from at least 50 consumer accounts, using the same setup at a different ATM at the same branch.
It was Puflene's second bust for skimming. He was arrested In Boynton Beach, Florida, for the same caper a year ago, along with then 30-year-old Mihai Arnauta, also from Romania. The pair had a GPS navigator in their van marking the locations of 25 southern Florida banks.
Thai police arrested two Romanian tourists on Thursday for alleged skimming in the city of Pattaya, and they suspect more are behind an ATM-skimming operation detected in Nashville late last month.
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