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Bank scams may have spread nationwide
The police on Sunday warned that recent thefts through ATM fraud, which have caused losses amounting to billions of rupiah to customers’ personal accounts, may have spread nationwide
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he police on Sunday warned that recent thefts through ATM fraud, which have caused losses amounting to billions of rupiah to customers’ personal accounts, may have spread nationwide.
Police Detective chief Comr. Gen. Ito Sumadi said the police were continuing to update their investigation on the case.
“Our cyber crime unit is continuing to probe the case and for now, we are certain [the perpetrators] have also expanded their crime spree to Kalimantan, Sumatra and Java,” Ito said.
East Kalimantan Police have arrested seven new suspects who illegally withdrew money from banks on Friday and Saturday.
Ito added that the arrest of the seven people raised the number of suspects to 20 people nationwide.
Previously, the National Police had announced that they had arrested 13 suspects in Jakarta and
Kalimantan.
“We suspect they are part of a syndicate and we expect to find more suspects,” East Kalimantan Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Antonius Wisnu Sutirta said.
The seven suspects were hotel staff who worked in the hotel’s finance, IT and general affairs departments, Antonius said.
“They colluded to use the hotel’s guests’ BNI-issued credit cards and sent fictitious claims to the bank,” Antonius said, adding that the suspects had been pulling off the scam since 2008 with 344 transactions in total.
National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Eduard Aritonang said on Saturday that the perpetrators may have used several techniques in stealing money from the banks.
He said the techniques included attaching scanning devices to ATMs that were able to read personal data on ATM cards, setting up fake hotline numbers to gather customer data, including their personal identification numbers (PIN) and selling customer data to other perpetrators.
Data for each customer was sold for around Rp 1 million, Aritonang added.
As of Saturday, the police announced there had been 36 victims of ATM scams in Jakarta, Kalimantan and Bali.
“We are still waiting for reports from other victims in other provinces,” Ito said.
Bank Indonesia disclosed that illegal transactions had caused losses to the savings of up to 200 customers of six major banks, namely Bank Central Asia (BCA), Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), Bank Permata and Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII).
Bank Indonesia’s data showed that BNI customers suffered Rp 220 million in losses, BRI customers lost Rp 49 million, while BCA account holders are believed to have suffered the highest losses, estimated at about Rp 5 billion so far. Data on the losses suffered by the three other banks was not available.
Ito urged all banks to immediately improve their ATM security system to help prevent further occurrences of such crimes.
The central bank’s director of banking supervision, Erwin Riyanto, said after a meeting on Saturday attended by all the banks’ officials that the banks had agreed to deal with the issue as quickly as possible.
