Along with others, the man managed to illegally gain more than a million dollars

Jan 7, 2012 10:46 GMT  ·  By

A Romanian man is charged by a court of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and bank fraud after he was arrested for running a card-skimming operation involving HSBC automated teller machines (ATMs) in New York.

Laurentiu Iulian Bulat is accused of placing skimming devices at 40 ATMs belonging to the New York branch of HSBC, one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world.

According to Wired, from May 2010 to January 5, 2011, the accused, along with other known and unknown individuals, installed card-skimmers and pinhole cameras at ATMs in Westchester, Manhattan and Long Island.

Special Agents from the United States Secret Service monitored their operations and after carefully investigating reports, records and video images they were able to arrest Bulat while trying to set up another skimmer.

“Bulat walked into the ATM vestibule area and went to the first ATM machine,” Eric Friedman, one of the Special Agents involved in the operation, wrote in the court affidavit.

“Bulat spent a few minutes at the machine, and his body was up close against the machine with his back to me. From my observation of him, he did not appear to be engaged in an ordinary ATM transaction.”

The suspect installed “fraudulent ‘skimming’ devices” on card readers, which recorded the information from the cards that passed through them. He also installed pinhole cameras to record the PINs entered by customers.

The criminal group then used the information to create fake credit cards which they later utilized to perform illegal transactions.

In the period of time during which the crimes were committed, the collective managed to gain $1.5 million (1 million EUR) from their fraudulent activities.

The apprehended man has been staying illegally in the US and, if convicted, he faces a maximum prison sentence of 60 years.