Turkish Police Arrest Alleged ATM Hacker-Kidnapper

Date: September 15, 2008
Source: wired.com


A notorious Turkish ATM hacker Cha0, who has been accused of torturing a police informant, was arrested Friday by Turkish officials -- despite the hacker's claim that not even the FBI could catch him, Turkey's Haber 7 reports.

In August, a fellow hacker-turned-informant who used the online nickname Kier accused Cha0 and his associates of abducting and beating him earlier in the year. Cha0 sent a photo of Kier -- pictured in only his underwear and holding a sign saying, "I'm a rat. ... I am fucked by Cha0" -- to Haber 7.

"I always had a question mark on my mind on where Cha0's men got the resources," Kier wrote the reporters in Turkish. "I found out firsthand when I had a weapon pointed at my head."

A well-known figure in the credit card fraud underground, Cha0 markets a high-quality ATM skimmer and PIN pad that fraudsters can covertly affix to certain models of cash machines. The skimmer records the magstripe data on a consumer's debit or credit card as they feed it into an ATM, while the PIN pad overlay stores the user's PIN. The stolen magstripe data can later be encoded onto a blank card and used to make withdrawals from victims' accounts.

Cha0's banner ad on DarkMarket shows a cartoon man wading through a house full of cash. "Is that you?" the text asks. "Yes. If you bought [a] skimmer and PIN pad from Cha0."
Original article

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