How Taiwanese police cracked NT$83 million ATM heist
International crime ring targeted 41 First Bank teller machines
Taiwanese police have revealed to foreign media for the first time how they managed to crack an NT$83 million (HK$20.4 million) bank heist by an international crime ring last month.
In an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post, Paul Liu Po-liang, the head of the island’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, said it was made possible by the help of civic-minded residents, a dense network of surveillance cameras, many sleepless nights and a little luck.
The suspect was smart enough to switch off his phone, but all the time we knew he was still in Yilan
It all began at 0.33am on Sunday July 10, when a hacked server at a London branch of Taiwan’s First Commercial Bank instructed the bank’s automatic teller machine in the central city of Taichung to spew out NT$90,000 worth of notes.
That was just a test, and in the next 15 hours, 40 other ATMs at the bank’s branches in Taichung, New Taipei City and Taipei dispensed a total of NT$83.27 million in cash in the first transcontinental ATM attack to target Taiwan.
None of the branches detected the ATM abnormalities in the early hours of Sunday but a couple waiting behind two foreigners at an ATM machine that night called police at 8.30pm after noticing they were acting suspiciously.
Police later found NT$60,000 worth of banknotes stuck in the ATM’s cash dispenser.