News

Authorities take out Bulgarian ATM skimming network

Officers found 3D printing equipment to produce fake plastic card slot bezels and confiscated dozens of forged payment cards with records of PIN numbers, ready to be used at ATMs.

October 1, 2014

Bulgarian and Spanish judicial and law enforcement authorities, working in close cooperation with the Europol European Cybercrime Centre in The Hague, have dismantled another Bulgarian organized crime network suspected of a variety of crimes including large scale ATM skimming, electronic payment fraud and forgery of documents.

"Operation Imperium" resulted in 31 arrests and 40 house searches on Sept. 30, a news release from Europol said. The coordinated action mainly took place in Malaga, Spain, and the Bulgarian cities of Sofia, Burgas, and Silistra.

Eight criminal labs, including two sophisticated production sites for skimming equipment and counterfeit documents, were discovered and dismantled during raids in Sofia and Malaga. Authorities seized more than 1,000 devices, micro camera bars, card readers, magnetic strip readers and writers, computers, phones and flash drives, as well as plastic cards ready to be encoded.

Officers found 3D printing equipment to produce fake plastic card slot bezels for ATMs and POS terminals and confiscated dozens of forged payment cards with records of PIN numbers, ready to be used at ATMs.

All raids and arrests took place simultaneously and were coordinated with the support of Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce officers at Europol headquarters in The Hague.

The primary modus operandi of the criminals and their associates was to harvest financial data from compromised ATMs and POS terminals in Europe in order to create counterfeit cards that could be used to withdraw large amounts of cash from ATMs outside the EU.

Troels Oerting, head of Europol EC3, congratulated law enforcement colleagues in Bulgaria and Spain on the successful operation:

We've hit another international organized payment crime network, which sends a strong signal to cybercriminal groups active in this field. This is a great example of effective joint efforts between EU Member States and EC3 to protect customers and their electronic transactions across the European Union. It also shows that police as well as other law enforcement authorities in the EU are putting Europol's unique tools to very good use to make electronic payment transactions safer. At the same time this successful case proved a very good use of the J-CAT framework which helped in the final stages of investigation.