The State police have charged a 27-year-old Romanian in connection with the ATM skimming fraud reported in the city in August.
K.E. Baiju, Assistant Commissioner, Cantonment, who investigated the case, said the suspect was part of a six-member group of Romanians who arrived in the country from Istanbul in July this year. Two of them remained in Mumbai while the rest left for Kerala. They booked themselves in different hotels and scoured the city for a suitable ATM to place their skimming devices.
The suspects identified one at Althara. They looped a Wi-Fi router to the cable linking the ATM to its bank’s server and stole card information with the help of a laptop. They also used a concealed camera focussed on the PIN pad of the ATM in tandem with the Wi-Fi router to capture the PIN numbers of customers.
They passed on the information to their associates in Mumbai who duplicated the card information on magnetic strips and used it along with the stolen PIN numbers to drain the accounts of card users. Gabriel, who was the handyman for the gang, was identified from ATM cameras. The State police arrested him in Mumbai. His associates had fled the country.
