News

Four indicted for skimming $1.5 million from banks' ATMs

June 12, 2011

The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York has indicted four men for allegedly skimming $1.5 million from ATMs and PIN Pads owned by Citibank and JPMorgan Chase Co.

Preet Bharara, Manhattan U.S. Attorney, announced last week that Mihail Draghici, Ionel Dedulescu, Didi Theodor Ciulei and Laurentiu Mugurel Manta were charged with a scheme to steal personal bank account information using skimming technology from Citibank and Chase bank branches in New York City, Chicago, Miami and elsewhere.

All four men are charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to commit access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. Draghici and Dedulescu also are charged with bank fraud.

Draghici, Dedulescu and Manta are Romanian nationals and Ciulei is a resident of Austria. U.S. Secret Service Agents arrested Ciulei and Manta May 29 in Chicago. Draghici and Dedulescu were arrested Dec. 2, 2010, as they attempted to board an international flight to flee the country, agents said.  If convicted of the charges, Ciulei and Manta face a maximum of 62 years in prison, and Draghici and Dedulescu face the possibility of 69.5 years in the penitentiary.

According to the indictment, between March 2010 and May 2011, the four allegedly used a fake overlay on the ATMs that looked like the real ATM PIN Pad. The overlays, however, were equipped with electronic equipment that recorded cardholders' PINs as they typed in their four-digit numbers into the ATM.

The U.S. Attorney also charged the four with visiting the bank's branches and replacing bank tellers' PIN Pads with identical-looking, fake PIN Pads that enabled the thieves to remotely steal cardholder information.

Thieves use the stolen cardholder data to manufacture fake debit cards in order to loot cardholders' bank accounts.