Three Ukrainian men have been arrested in Chiang Mai with 56 counterfeit electronic cards they used to withdraw about 1.5 million baht cash from bank ATMs, police said on Wednesday.
Yevhen Vorontsev, 36, Andrii Herashohenko, 23, and Dmytro Kuchin, 20 have been charged with colluding with another gang member in using fake ATM cards to steal money from banks, police said at a press conference at Chiang Mai’s Muang district police station on Wednesday.
The trio were apprehended separately while using fake ATM cards to withdraw cash in downtown areas on Tuesday.
Police seized 56 fake ATM cards, 67,000 baht cash, four passports and a calculator.
Pol Maj Gen Montri Sambunnanont, chief of Chiang Mai police, said the arrests came after Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) reported unusual cash withdrawals from its ATM machines.
police investigators had examined footage of closed-circuit cameras which showd four foreign men withdrawing cash from those machines. Three of them were subsequently caught but the fourth, identified later as Dymteo Vlad, 31, managed to flee.
The police investigation revealed the gang had used counterfeit electronic cards to make 1,000 withdrawals, of which 162 were successful and they stole about 1.5 million baht in cash.
A bank staffer said the gang had attached skimming devices to SCB ATM machines and then transferred the stolen information to blank cards.