CRIME | Credit card data of over 1,000 customers stolen

Over 1,000 locals and visitors’ credit card information has been compromised in a cyber theft orchestrated by an organized crime group from eastern Europe, according to the Judiciary Police.
The authorities arrested the syndicate’s two Bulgarian members last Saturday night in a hotel room in Taipa. The pair was uploading the data from two automatic teller machines (ATM): one located at the Venetian Macao’s Grand Canal shopping area; the other near Senado Square. Both men are unemployed, and are aged 30 and 35.
Between March and May, the security arm received theft reports from five banks, citing attempted theft of 26 of their clients’ credit cards in Vietnam and Malaysia. Fortunately, the card owners had disabled foreign withdrawals from their cards and escaped loss.
The suspicious attempts were traced back to the anonymous group, which started enlisting members last year, as one of the accused individuals told the investigators.
Active since last December, the crime syndicate regularly dispatched two members into the territory, where they would install sophisticated card readers on 24-hour ATM service centers. They would also install pinhole cameras nearby, concealed within announcement notices extracted from other banks.
“The color and body of the device, as well as the texture, had nothing unusual. Therefore, citizens and even bank staff did not realise that the ATMs had been modified,” said the chief of the PJ’s Information Crime Investigation Division, Sou Sio Keong.
The equipment was said to help record the data and passwords of cards inserted into the machine, which were then uploaded into the group’s cloud storage.
The organized crime group would pay members based on the volume of bank card information stolen whenever fake cards were produced. The reward money ranged between USD2,000 and USD8,000.
One of the suspects was said to have entered the region in March for the first time. The investigators seized two laptops and two card readers along with fake cards, cameras and several Renminbi and Euro banknotes in the pair’s hideout.