A total of Yen 1.4 billion has been stolen from 1,400 cash machines in Japan in a co-ordinated two-hour raid by 100 people using cloned bank cards. The culprits used the cards to make approximately 14,000 transactions, each totaling Yen 100,000, from cash machines located in convenience stores across the country in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Cash was withdrawn almost simultaneously across Tokyo and 16 other prefectures across the country using as many as 1,600 counterfeit credit cards containing account information stolen from the South African institution Standard Bank.
The theft at convenience store ATMs took place in the morning of May 15 (Sunday!), when banks were closed.
It was not clear how the gang made off with the equivalent of millions of dollars so quickly as the cash machines usually limit withdrawals to 100,000 yen (910 USD) a day. Due to the robbery, Standard Bank Group Ltd., Africa’s biggest bank by assets, said it lost as much as 300 million rand ($19 million) to organized fraud in Japan, according to Bloomberg.
Japanese police say they are working with authorities in South Africa to investigate the crime.
The case is similar to a pair of heists that took place in 26 countries in 2012 and 2013, when a criminal syndicate using a network of ‘cashout crews’ to steal $55 million from ATM machines in the space of a couple of hours.
In 2009, RBS WorldPay, the US payments processing arm of Royal Bank of Scotland Group, lost $9 million in a 30-minute period during a global ATM heist that involved 100 cloned cards in 49 cities worldwide.
Source: finextra.com
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
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