Fraud arrest at cashpoint
Following a tipoff from bank officials in central Greece, a man has been arrested in the act of withdrawing money from an automatic teller machine using a forged cashcard, police said on Saturday. The suspect, a Romanian national, is believed to belong to a cash and credit card fraud gang that had cast a net all over Greece using midget video cameras to record the data entered by bank customers at ATM machines. Once in possession of their victims’ names and pin codes, gang members used state-of-the-art software to forge cash and credit cards with which they milked bank accounts. A second suspect escaped arrest during the operation outside the Alpha Bank ATM in Lamia on Friday night, which followed a phone call by bank officials who had located the attempted fraud on their computer system. A microcamera capable of recording pin numbers was discovered at a Komitini bank ATM in August. Two weeks ago, police at the Bulgarian border arrested two men trying to smuggle credit card copying equipment into Greece.
