Romania Nabs 25 Alleged Cyberthieves Who Stole $15M

An international gang that hacked into banks, cloned payment cards and stole more than $15 million in 2013 may have been broken up in raids by authorities in Romania, according to the IDG News Service.

Authorities searched 42 houses in six Romanian cities on Sunday (April 26) and detained 25 suspected gang members, as well as seizing laptops and mobile phones, €150,000 ($163,000) in cash, gold bars weighing 2 kilograms, and paintings. Gang leaders also invested some of the stolen money in real estate, according to the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism.

Investigators said the gang, which had more than 50 members, broke into bank computer systems in Puerto Rico and Muscat, Oman, and used the unauthorized access to steal payment card data for large corporate accounts. The gang then made fraudulent debit cards and used them to make ATM withdrawals in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand as well as Romania.

The ATM cashouts were performed in multi-million-dollar bursts, authorities said. For example, on Feb. 20, 2013, gang members withdrew $9 million from ATMs in Japan, and on Dec. 2, 2013, got $5 million from 4,200 withdrawals at ATMs in 15 Romanian cities.

But the $15 million in ATM fraud that Romanian prosecutors believe they can prove may be the tip of the iceberg. There are suspicious similarities to a cybertheft gang that U.S. authorities said in 2013 was responsible for at least $45 million in ATM fraud.

In May 2013, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted eight suspected cybercrime gang members, accusing them of hacking into global banks, stealing prepaid card data and removing their withdrawal limits. One of the banks hit by that gang was the Bank of Muscat in Oman — and the cashouts were made at ATMs in 26 countries that largely match the countries listed by Romanian authorities this week.