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With further arrests made over the weekend, the police now have 13 suspects in custody for various ATM-related crimes in different parts of the country, indicating that the problem is worse than previously believed. 

The National Police on Sunday said they had yet to confirm whether the suspects were linked in any way, or tied to the recent wave of ATM thefts in Bali. 

“We have not come to the conclusion that the suspects have been in contact with one another through one syndicate, as their modus operandi is different,” said National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Edward Aritonang, adding that the suspects were being detained at National Police headquarters in Jakarta and by police in West Kalimantan and East Kalimantan. 

He said the police had seized more than 264,000 ATM personal identification numbers from one of the suspects, but that they were still investigating whether the PINs were accurate or not. 

“The perpetrator either used the PINs for his own purposes or sold them to other criminals. The price is Rp 1 million [$108] per PIN,” he said. 

In East Kalimantan, local police chief Insp. Gen. Mathius Salempang said on Sunday that officers there apprehended seven people for alleged ATM-related crimes. “But those seven people did not have any link with what is going on in Bali,” he said. 

This gang, Mathius said, consisted of a businessman identified as Syamsir Alamsyah and six employees from a Balikpapan hotel. 

“The modus operandi was that Syamsir used his card to pay his bill when he stayed at the hotel. With the assistance of the hotel staff, he would then swipe his card through the electronic data capturing device at the hotel, which belonged to another bank, let’s call it bank A,” he said. 

The hotel staff, Mathius said, were supposed to validate Syamsir’s card, a debit card issued by PT Bank Negara Indonesia before approving it. 

“But the fact is they approved it because they received money from Syamsir. We also suspect that hotel staff worked with an insider at bank A who then claimed the billed amount from BNI. Even though these were not valid transactions, BNI must pay bank A because it BNI issued the card to Syamsir,” Aritonang said. 

Over eight months, this syndicate has allegedly been able to withdraw more than Rp 4.7 billion. “This is because Syamsir sometimes withdrew cash from the hotel and then got the hotel to make a fake bill to claim that there had been a transaction,” he said. 

Aritonang also confirmed that a suspect previously arrested for ATM thefts, who had only been identified by his initial F, was in fact Fransiscus Januarta, 39. “He is a convicted offender,” he said. 

Januarta was arrested along with evidence in the form of Rp 23 million in cash, a computer, a skimming device and various ATM cards in Petamburan, West Jakarta, on Friday. 

A police investigator told the Jakarta Globe that, “so far Fransiscus is the only suspect [arrested outside Bali] who may be related to the thefts from bank accounts through ATMs in Bali.” 

He also said Franciscus was tried for a similar crime in Semarang in 2002, when he used a counterfeit Standard Chartered credit card illegally to withdraw Rp 8.5 billion to pay his friend’s hospital’s costs. 

Police were able to arrest Fransicus after they examined what was going on in Bali and opened their old files on ATM-related crimes. “We focused on several suspicious profiles including that of Fransiscus,” the investigator said. 

Bali Police earlier said data-capturing devices, known as skimmers, had been seized from ATMs in Denpasar and Kuta. The device records all the coded information from the card, and this information is then used to clone a card. 

The criminals also installed mini cameras in ATM booths to record PINs. With the clone card and the PIN, the thieves are able withdraw money from the victim’s account or transfer it to another victim’s account before withdrawing the money. 

Suspects can be charged under the controversial 2008 Information and Electronic Transaction Law (ITE) and can face up to eight years in prison if convicted. 

Tigor Nauli, head of the Informatics Research Center at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), told the Jakarta Globe on Friday that recent incidents of ATM skimming were not part of a small-time racket. He feared a more high-tech method was being used.