Banks lose $45m in biggest heist
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New York: A worldwide gang of criminals stole $45 million in hours by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining cash machines around the globe, prosecutors said on Thursday and outmoded US card technology may be partly to blame.
Prosecutors said the case involved thousands of thefts from ATMs using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks. The fraudsters moved with astounding speed to loot financial institutions around the world, working in cells including one in New York, US Attorney Loretta Lynch said. She called it “a massive 21st-century bank heist.“ Seven US citizens from the Dominican Republic are under arrest.
One suspect was caught on surveillance cameras, his backpack increasingly loaded down with cash, authorities said. Others took photos of themselves with giant wads of bills as they made their way up and down Manhattan.
Hackers got into bank databases, eliminated withdrawal limits on prepaid debit cards and created access codes. Others loaded that data onto any plastic card with a magnetic stripe -an old hotel key card or an expired credit card worked fine as long as they carried the account data and correct access codes.
A network of operatives then fanned out to rapidly withdraw money in multiple cities, authorities said.
The cells would take a cut of the money, then launder it through expensive purchases or ship it wholesale to the global ringleaders. Miss Lynch didn't say where they were located.
The targets were reserves held by the banks to fund pre-paid credit cards, not individual account holders, she said. A security analyst said it was the biggest ATM fraud case she had heard of. There were two separate attacks, one in December that reaped $5 million worldwide and one in February that snared about $40 million in 10 hours with about 36,000 transactions.
The scheme involved attacks on two banks, Rakbank in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman, prosecutors said. The plundered ATMs were in 27 countries including Japan, Russia, Romania, Egypt, Colombia, Britain, Sri Lanka and Canada, and law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen nations were involved in the investigation, US prosecutors said.
The accused ringleader in the US cell, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pena, was reportedly killed in the Dominican Republic last month, prosecutors said.
Such ATM fraud schemes are not uncommon, but the $45 million stolen in this one was at least double the amount involved in previously known cases, said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
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