Attackers Steal $12.7M In Massive ATM Heist (mainichi.jp)

Within two hours $12.7 million in cash was stolen from 1,400 ATMs located at convenience stores all across Japan, investigators announced Sunday. An anonymous reader quotes a Japanese newspaper: Police suspect that the cash was withdrawn at ATMs using counterfeit credit cards containing account information leaked from a South African bank. Japanese police will work with South African authorities through the International Criminal Police Organization to look into the major theft, including how credit card information was leaked, the sources said.
Over the two hours attackers withdrew the equivalent of $907 in 14,000 different transactions.

Comments

Re: $907?

[ShanghaiBill]

14,000 x $907 = $12.7m So where do you join this gang of 1400 fantastically well coordinated thieves?

$907 is exactly 100,000 Yen, which is the transaction limit.

Re:$907?

[Hognoxious]

To be fair, the sentence probably should have contained the word "each".

Re: $907?

[rednip]

I suspect that each thief used multiple accounts until each of the ATMs was out of money, then moved to the next one. Perhaps 10 or twenty large withdraws each one might take 10 to 20 minutes. Five to ten minutes to get to the next ATM would give four to eight 'sessions' over two hours, so I'd guess that each one worked 40 to 160 transactions, lets say 100 each for lack of better data. Meaning about 140 crooks for the 'back of napkin estimate', I'm no expert on the Yakuza, but that number seems really 'doable'.