Operation Imperium Busts Bulgarian Fake Payment Cards Group

Bulgaria and Spain, in cooperation with Europol, have dismantled a significant Bulgarian organised payment crime network.

The crime ring is suspected of a variety of crimes including large scale ATM skimming, electronic payment fraud and forgery of documents, Europol said in a statement.

Twenty-six arrests were made in Bulgaria and another five in Spain on September 30 as part of Operation Imperium. The coordinated action took place mainly in Malaga in Spain and in Sofia, Burgas and Silistra in Bulgaria. A total of 40 house searches were conducted.

Bulgarian and Spanish judicial and law enforcement authorities, aided by Europol's European Cybercrime Centre in The Hague, discovered eight criminal labs, including two very complex modern production sites for skimming equipment and counterfeit documents in Sofia and Malaga.

Card readers, magnetic strip readers and writers, computers, phones and flash drives, as well as plastic cards ready to be encoded were seized during the raids. 3D printing equipment used to produce fake plastic card slot bezels as well as forged payment cards with records of PIN numbers were also confiscated, Europol said.

The organized crime group used the equipment to collect financial data from ATMs or tampered POS terminals in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and Turkey. The data was copied onto fake payment cards which could then be used to withdraw large cash from ATMs outside the EU, for example in Peru and the Philippines.

Europol’s announcement came in the wake of the arrest of two Bulgarian nationals for credit card fraud in Peru in September.

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