Vizag: Bulgarian national arrested for cloning of ATMs cards

The police on Saturday here arrested a Bulgarian national for allegedly cloning ATMs.

City Task Force Team led by ACP Mahendra Mathe came to know that some foreign national was moving into ATM centres in a suspicious manner and was staying in Dolphin Hotel and suspected of doing ATM cloning in his room.

Following which Cyber Crime staff apprehended him and a case was registered in the Cyber Crime Police Station.

During the interrogation, he revealed that earlier he used to work as a bartender. When his friend introduced him to an unknown person who said that they will arrange travel tickets for him to Kolkata where he will receive one laptop and card cloner machine, Airtel SIM card and empty cards for card cloning and offered 20 per cent commission on total money withdrawn from ATMs in India.

He reached Kolkata on January 31 and stayed in Howard Jhonson Hotel for two days and also collected one HP Laptop, card cloning slot machine, Airtel SIM and 160 blank ATM cards.

On February 3, he came to Visakhapatnam by flight and stayed at Four Points Hotel for 6 days. He then moved to another hotel and then finally checked-in Dolphin Hotel.

During his stay in Vizag, he used a telegram account with Indian SIM and received messages from unknown accounts as links photos of files which contained credit and debit card numbers of foreigners along with PIN Numbers and country name.

Later, he used laptop and cloning device and copied one by one these card numbers onto empty cards and cloned 76 cards.

He withdrew more than Rs 13 lakhs and also bought 2000 Dollars from different places in Vizag by exchange with Indian currency in Vizag area.