Posted on 04/11/2008 5:33:46 AM PDT by fweingart
Four one-way tickets Sofia-Miami: About $4,000. Haul from the heist: At least $2 million.
Busting the four Bulgarians who figured out yet another ingenious way to hijack ATMS -- literally from the inside out, with tiny cameras: Priceless.
''It was very satisfying,'' said the Miami Beach police detective who led six undercover colleagues in tracking down and arresting the four men, who are now in the Miami-Dade County Jail.
The quartet is accused of installing ''skimmers'' on the outside of ATMs and cameras inside to capture PIN and account numbers, then reprogramming retail-store gift cards and nefariously acquired credit cards with the information to withdraw cash.
Miami Beach police spokesman Detective Juan Sanchez asked that the names of the undercover officers -- from the economic crimes and auto-theft unit -- not be used, to protect their anonymity.
Sanchez said that federal and other local law-enforcement agencies had been chasing the four men for two years, during which time they stole from ''thousands of victims'' from South Florida to New Jersey.
Facing multiple felony charges, including grand theft, criminal use of personal identification, credit-card fraud, violations of the Communications Fraud Act and tampering with evidence, are: Nikolai H. Arabov, 37, also charged with cocaine possession; Diyan N. Dobrev, 34; Stanimir G. Kolev, 36, and Denislav Filipov, 19.
Police said that all four men were in the United States legally, on legitimate visas.
The top-left guy, he doesn’t look as Bulgarian as the rest, does he?
He looks rather like an A-rab.
Semetic, yes. A-rab no
Boy, aren’t they pretty? Maybe Bulgaria kicked them out because the Bulgarians couldn’t stand looking at them anymore! (Or maybe all Bulgarians look like that ... I don’t know...but I hope not.)
Ladies and gentlemen, as a Bulgarian married to an American, legal alien now since 1996, husband, father and a US taxpayer, I would like to inform you that no, not all Bulgarians look like that and no, not all Bulgarians are busy with breaking into ATMs.
Unfortunately, Bulgaria has had a very poor track record in the last 100 years, always on the wrong side in both world wars, having been fascist, then communist until 1989. The country has been basically run mostly by former communists thugs since then and even until today. They have no interest or will in reigning in the mafia and crime, since they are all part of it. It’s beyond me how we were admitted into NATO and the EU, I suppose due to the geopolitical interests of the Western world. Which I’d rather be part of, as opposed to Putin’s Russia for example.
I’d say the majority of Bulgarians are hard-working, good natured people whose one major drawback is their lack of ability to think and act as free people and citizens and to demand those in power move beyond democracy on paper only.
www.georgebakalov.net
Sorry, that was kind of thoughtless! I actually have known some Bulgarians here (in SF) and I know they’re not all criminals and furthermore, there are some very good looking Bulgarians!
I think that one of the problems experienced by people from the former Communist countries is that they were very used to surviving by various forms of bureaucratic fraud, etc. and it probably created a culture where this was easy to get into. The Russian mafia is big on things like this, particularly tax scams and ID theft, and I’m sure it came out of the strange environment that Communism always creates.
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