UPDATE 11.00 - Among the suspects there are Gheorghe Ignat, known as the "Carpathian bear", a mixed martial arts fighter, national and international champion and a man imprisoned in Bacau too, judicial sources said.
According to the investigators, the first group, consisting of three people, among whom George Ignat too, were operating a fitting skimming devices on ATMs in cities on the east coast of Australia, to obtain data form bank cards, cloning them and withdrawing money..
The second group was made up of six people, dealing with phishing activities and fraudulent cash transfers.
Two members were initially identified in the first group, one specializing in manufacturing plastic frames for skimming which they used to deliver to other groups specialized in computer fraud ..
Suceava DIICOT prosecutors established that between June to September 2010, Gheorghe Ignat, along with another Romanian, were in Australia, where they set-up devices on ATMs, transmitting data from bank cards in Romania through the internet in order to have it decoded. The other members of the group would send the two the data decoded like this over the internet and they would commit fraudulent cash withdrawals.
According to the data provided by the Australian authorities, Ignat and his accomplice withdrew illegally 149,000 Australian dollars in Australia and made further fraudulent withdrawals from ATMs in Malaysia and the UK, totaling 16,000 Australian dollars.
The members of the second group, which included people from Iasi, Sibiu and Bucharest, collected data phishing through bank cards belonging mainly to citizens of the United Kingdom, the money withdrew from the cards was being transferred through websites bank transfer and currency exchange to erase its track.
According to the DIICOT, the group members pursued a broad range of cybercrimes, managing to obtain large amounts of money from illegally accessing multiple systems, where they stole confidential data or information which was not meant for the public, consequently performing fraudulent operations with electronic payment tools.
The defendants used several companies with the object of providing IT services for creating and maintaining an IT infrastructure that allowed them illegal access , in violation of security measures to obtain data and information from the computer systems belonging to foreign known companies, such as gas stations or grocery stores, " the DIICOT press release informs quoted by Mediafax.
Thus, the group members would illegally intercept IT data transmissions between the computer systems involved in in making payments or in credit card payments authentication, through specially designed tools for that purpose, illegally installed on the targeted IT systems.
The prosecutors stated that during the period December 2011 to October 2012 alone, through a specialized virtual store, 68.000 cards were sold at four dollars apiece, while the group members had made 270.000 dollars in profits.
The persons investigated in this case would have conducted fraudulent transactions by 500,000 electronic payment tools totaling over 25 million dollars, DIICOT prosecutors stated.
Judicial police officers from BCCO Brasov, Galati, Timisoara, SCCO Vâlcea, and workers in the Romanian County Police were involved in the operation. The technical and IT support was provided by the Special Operations and Intelligence Directorate and the Romanian Intelligence Service.