Jul 14, 2011 16:52 GMT  ·  By

A major credit card skimming gang operating out of Bulgaria has been dismantled in a cross-continental law enforcement effort coordinated by Europol.

Codenamed Operation Night Clone, the law enforcement action consisted of simultaneous raids in Italy, Spain, Poland, US and Bulgaria, where the bulk of suspects, including the alleged leaders, were arrested.

According to Europol, which coordinated the effort and provided a secure line of intelligence sharing between the participating law enforcement agencies, 47 suspects were arrested in Bulgaria, 9 in Italy, 2 in Spain, 2 in US and one in Poland.

The gang specialized in skimming credit cards from European ATMs and cloning them for use in regions like the United States or Africa where the EMV (chip and PIN) technology is not used.

"Payment cards in the EU are targeted for cloning, and the fraud committed in other regions which still accept payment by magnetic strip. This was the major feature of the criminal methodology used by the organised crime group in this case and is an increasingly common problem," the European police agency said.

The operation was led by the Italian Postal Police which initiated the investigation last year. It saw the participation of over 200 police officers and investigators from five countries. The arrests have uncovered leads that will be subject of further investigation in three additional countries.

"This operation shows, however, that Europol and its law enforcement partners are determined to crack down on the problem. One of the most significant criminal groups active in this field has been taken out of business in a fantastic example of international police cooperation,” said Europol's Director Rob Wainwright.

However, in addition to the fact that magstripe-only credit card transactions are viewed as a major problem, security researchers have shown that the EMV standard has big security holes too.

Earlier this year at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam, two security experts demonstrated an EMV skimmer that is virtually impossible to detect by the ATM user. So even if all countries switch to EMV, this does not guarantee that skimming attacks will disappear.