A Hyattsville man has pleaded guilty to stealing more than $200,000 from at least 77 victims across the Washington region by using an illegal device to skim bank account information from automated teller machine users.
Vitalijs Balsevics, 26, was one of two men accused of the “ATM skimming” conspiracy that federal agents tracked from April until mid-September, according to federal documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria.
The other man, Konstantin Sintsev, 24, also from Hyattsville, has been charged but hasn’t entered a plea.
According to a sworn statement from U.S. Secret Service agent Kathleen Cleary and Balsevics’ guilty plea, the two men targeted Chevy Chase Bank in six locations in Maryland and Virginia. They would set up a device on the cash machines that would read the
debit card’s magnetic strip, gathering basic account information. A second device attached to the ATM’s keypad would snag the user’s personal identification number.
The combination of bank account information and PIN enabled Balsevics and Sintsev to access victims’ bank accounts and steal their money, the statements said. The men took as much as $8,600 from each of the more than 77 accounts they targeted.
Chevy Chase Bank reported to the Secret Service that several of its ATMs had been compromised after the bank received several complaints from customers reporting fraudulent withdrawals.
Secret Service agents set up surveillance outside the six compromised machines and eventually caught Balsevics and Sintsev in action.
Calls to Chevy Chase Bank were not returned. Banks typically have a policy in place ensuring that money lost through fraud or theft is returned to the customer.
Skimming — a wide-reaching term used to describe the theft of ATM account information — has been around since the birth of ATMs in the 1980s. Federal authorities, the bank industry and ATM manufacturers have been in a high-tech battle ever since.
The Secret Service has been involved in the war against skimming since 2002, when a series of skimming schemes made national headlines and the government began to fret over terrorist connections to the easily grabbed money.
In August, a skimming scheme at a Montgomery County Bank of America ATM yielded thieves at least $60,000. The suspects have not been caught.
