The first to be caught was Dmitry Brezinev. In the small town of Kamloops, British Columbia, he inserted one of 77 cards into a machine and tried to withdraw 500 dollars. The machine refused, and the young man did not know that he was already under police surveillance, which was watching him from 50 meters away from the bank. He did not have time to make another attempt with a different card - he was arrested.
At the moment when handcuffs were being put on the criminal, far from British Columbia, in Holland, someone withdrew money from a machine there - also with a counterfeit card. The traces of this robbery led to Canada. The exposure was the result of the joint work of bank employees and local police.
Through the loopholes
The authorities established: 35-year-old Dmitry Brezinev had in his pocket not only counterfeit cards, but also a fake passport, with which he entered Canada.
How do such people get into the country? 'Our immigration system is not without flaws,' explained Ben Soav, a Canadian police officer who heads the unit for combating crime from Eastern European countries. 'But you have no idea how many we don't let in!' These five are among those who slipped through.
Following Brezinev, four more people were arrested in Toronto - Marina Kashina, Yulia Rovenskaya, Sergei Shapar, Vladimir Savenkov. During the arrest, police seized from them 280 thousand in cash (in 20-dollar bills - Canadian ATMs mainly dispense such bills) and 3.5 thousand counterfeit cards. All those arrested confessed to what they had done. Brezinev was sentenced to 26 months in prison, Kashina and Rovenskaya received 20 months each, Shapar and Savenkov are in a detention center in Toronto awaiting sentencing.
But even now it is clear to the police: the arrested and confessed Russians turned out to be merely pawns in this game. They had a simple task - to take counterfeit cards and withdraw as much money as possible from machines using them. As payment for their services, they were allowed to keep 4% of the cash thus obtained.
Where is the big fish?
At the same time, the police still do not know (or do not say) who is the author of this fraud. It is possible, the police hint, that the matter has roots in international organized crime.
According to court materials, the whole scheme began in Canada when a certain businessman - his name is not specified - purchased five ATMs in 2002. This man, according to bank employees, 'looked quite respectable, he had a very convincing business plan.'
The machines, costing 10 thousand Canadian dollars each, were installed in various places in British Columbia and Ontario. In Canada this is a normal thing, and the number of private bank machines has increased significantly since 1996, when the government opened the doors to private individuals in this business, wanting to create competition for large banks. Anyone with a few thousand dollars can become the owner of a cash machine. True, they will check your financial history, but those are details.
As a result, it turned out: in Canada, the number of private bank machines per capita is the highest in the world. There are even more of these machines here than those owned by banks - of the 40 thousand ATMs in the country, 59% belonged to private owners last year. These machines are very popular among Canadians - last year citizens used them 1.3 billion times.
The criminals also took advantage of this popularity. Every time a client withdrew money through an ATM owned by 'that very man,' the equipment built into it read all the necessary information from the magnetic stripe. The rest became a matter of not very complicated technology - the stolen data had to be applied, without worrying too much about the design, onto any plastic card, even a library card, for instance. This process is not at all complicated, experts say; it is similar to how information is applied and then reprogrammed on hotel cards, which hotels use instead of room keys.
And who are the victims?
'Most of these transactions go without problems,' says the press secretary of the Canadian Bankers Association. When he was asked about the financial losses incurred as a result of this fraud, the answer was somewhat puzzling: the association does not have such statistics.
Meanwhile, in the case of the arrested Russians alone, money disappeared from the accounts of four thousand citizens - cash was often withdrawn in places where the true account holders had never even been in their lives.
The banks reimbursed them for all losses. So no one has suffered? 'It only seems at first glance that this crime has no victims,' says Ben Soav. 'Yes, no one was killed, wounded, or physically maimed, but in the end we will all become victims of this crime. No bank will pay for this out of its own pocket. We will all have to pay for everything, we as bank clients, in the form of increased fees for certain services.'