The Technical Set-Up

A company controlled by Florian Tudor’s gang won a contract to install cash machines for Mexican bank Banco Multiva in 2014. Tudor and his crew used the opportunity to place compromised machines with built-in skimmers around Mexico’s Riviera Maya tourist area. The gang’s machines were cleverly set up, with some even featuring Bluetooth devices that allowed them to download user data remotely. In 2015 Brian Krebs, an American journalist, learned from a source that ATMs in Mexico’s Riviera Maya had been compromised and traveled to the area, where he found some of the skimming devices. After he published stories on his findings, the gang grew more sophisticated and began installing skimming technology directly onto the motherboards of their ATMs so that it couldn’t be detected from the outside of the machines.