Bali had already had a bad rap for ATM skimmers, but now we can see just how epically questionable the situation is on our island after the arrest of a Bulgarian national for allegedly attaching a skimming device to an ATM in Hardy’s, a supermarket in Nusa Dua.
It turns out that Bali’s ATMs are so sketchy that Europol has ranked our island as the third worldwide for worst ATM skimming locations. That’s Bali alone, not even Indonesia as a whole. Indonesia’s own separate ranking comes at seven, according to Denpasar Police general crimes unit head Comr. Reinhard Nainggolan.
The Bulgarian, 39-year-old Yanko Ivanov, arrested on March 27, is believed to have used two devices, that are apparently common in the skimming business: a router tapping into wifi that would steal bank data of bank customers, and then a keypad canopy that had a camera and USB to get PIN codes, Nainggolan said.
Ivanov was reportedly arrested because BNI had suspected someone had tampered with one of their ATMs and upped their surveillance. It was on March 27 that they then noticed a foreigner, Ivanov, doing something odd in the ATM, which allegedly turned out to be installing a fake keyboard.
Nainggolan apparently sees this whole Bulgarians engaging in ATM crime as a larger scale thing and says that there’s a whole village in Bulgaria where residents are trained experts in ATM theft. How’s that for an international conspiracy?
“It’s not defamation. But in fact, in Bulgaria there really is a village whose residents are experts in stealing from ATMS and bank customer data,” Nainggolan said, as quoted by Tribun Bali.
Police suspect Ivanov had been in Bali for about three months but details still need to be confirmed with Immigration on that.
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