Automated robbery: how card skimmers (still) steal millions from banks

In January 2011, a pair of Bulgarian-born Canadians named Nikolai Ivanov and Dimitar Stamatov took a road trip from their home in Quebec to New York City. Their five-day visit to Manhattan’s East Village and Astor Place wasn’t your typical tourist trek, though; instead of Statue of Liberty souvenirs, the pair collected the card data and personal identification numbers for over 1,100 ATM cards. Ivanov and Stamatov were "skimmers."

Skimming isn’t new—it’s been around almost as long as ATM machines. But Ivanov and Stamatov benefitted from a new generation of skimming technology that has turned the once-difficult crime into a mass-market business. Using pre-fabricated gear perfectly matched to the hardware of Chase Bank ATMs, they were able to read the magnetic stripe off of victims' cards and even record victims punching in their PINs. After this bit of fun, the duo went on a cross-country withdrawal spree using clones made from their victims' cards, pulling over $264,000 in cash from machines in Arizona, Illinois, and Canada.