Three East Europeans arrested following the theft of more than NT$83 million (US$2.59 million) from First Commercial Bank automated teller machines (ATMs) spent their first day in custody at the Taipei Detention Center yesterday.
A judge granted prosecutors’ request that the trio be held incommunicado, but they may have access to their lawyers.
Saying that the three pose considerable flight risks, and could attempt to collude with other suspects to manipulate evidence, the Taipei District Court denied their application for bail, and ordered them taken to the detention center in New Taipei City’s Tucheng District (土城).
At the bail court hearing, Andrejs Peregudovs, 41, from Latvia; Niklae Penkov, 34, from Moldova; and Mihail Colibaba, 30, from Romania, were all provided with translators, and were allowed to make statements on their own behalf with the aid of their lawyers.
Under questioning, Penkov and Colibaba said that they were recruited by a Ukrainian man they knew only as “Ion,” who promised to pay them US3,000 each if they worked as “money collectors” for him in Taiwan, prosecutors said.
Peregudovs allegedly said he took the job because he had a 3,000 euro (US$3,307) debt, and was promised a reward of US$10,000 after completing the task.
According to the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB), a total of 17 foreigners came to Taiwan to carry out the alleged theft from ATMs in the greater Taipei area and Taichung on July 9 and July 10.
The CIB said the group included seven Russians, six Romanians, one Lithuanian, one Australian, one Latvian, one Moldovan, all of whom are male, and one Russian woman, identified as Oxana Sarkisova, 42.
According to CIB investigators, a voice recording server at a London branch office of First Commercial Bank was hacked and implanted with malware ahead of the ATM heist, and insider assistance could not be ruled out yet.
Officials said that when information security personnel investigated how the bank’s network was hacked and how the ATMs had been controlled, they found irregularities in the connections between the voice server in London, the bank’s internal network and the ATMs in Taiwan.
After analyzing the connections, the technicians discovered malware and content that should not have been there, and they concluded that the server was the likely network endpoint exploited by the hackers.
An investigation by the CIB indicated that the initial hack took place on July 4 and was tested on ATMs on July 9.
The bureau said that because the bank’s computer system is a closed network, an international ring had likely hacked the computer system of the bank’s London branch and then obtained the account number of the ATM computer system’s administrator, giving the ring access to the internal network.
To check its suspicions, the bureau summoned staff from the bank’s London branch to Taiwan on Friday to cooperate in the investigation.
The bureau has questioned staff from the bank’s London branch and headquarters as well as personnel from Wincor Nixdorf, the manufacturer of the compromised ATMs.
First Commercial Bank chairman Tsai Ching-nain (蔡慶年) on Monday said that 51 of the bank’s 438 Wincor PC1500 ATMs were hacked during the heist.
Tsai said that the company has decided to phase out the PC1500 ATM, adding that deputy managers and other executives would be disciplined over the heist.
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