TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The police arrested a group of criminals for stealing and counterfeiting credit cards after receiving reports from banks in March. Sr. Comm. Rikwanto, spokesperson for the Jakarta Metro Police, said on Thursday that the bank reports were based on analyses of suspicious transactions in several countries.
"The transactions were suspected to come from the computers of several Body Shop stores in Jakarta and Padang," said Rikwanto.
The police then conducted a forensic investigation of Body Shop's computers. They found that a third party had been trying to plant malware in the stores' computer system. During the investigation, the Metro Police special crime unit got several IP addresses from a number of European, Asian, and American countries.
Sr. Comm. Hery Santoso, Deputy Chief of the Jakarta Metro Police Special Crime Unit, said the total loss from the transactions is estimated to reach Rp4 billion. The overall loss could be greater.
The police found that the card information have been used in Mexico, United States, and other countries. They also found debit card transactions at a clothing store in Medan and at a watch store in Pekanbaru. From these findings, the police managed to track down the suspects; Suri Anni (SA), 36; and Thiam Kim (TK), 37.
SA and TK are known as data purchasers, producers of fake credit cards, and users of stolen credit cards' data. SA and TK received the stolen credit cards' data through FA and KN. "I paid millions," said Suri Anni (SA). In her confession, SA said she received blank cards, some stolen credit card data and an encoder from FA, which were sent to her though a shipping service.
The suspects got hold of the stolen credit cards' data through several forums that can be easily accessible by anyone in the world. SA and KN confessed of having accounts in www.icq.com. ICQ is the first Internet-wide instant messaging service launched in 1996. The site also allows free file transfers between users. As early as 2001, it had more than 100 million registered accounts.
MAYA NAWANGWULAN
