Four Years For ATM Fraudster

A Bulgarian national has been sentenced to four years for defrauding €25,000 in a single week.

Yanislav Alekandrov, 29, a Bulgarian national who has 21 previous convictions, was stopped by garda as he tried to avoid a check point.

Gardaí found an identity card, a Bank of Ireland PASS card in a different name and four Homebase store cards.

Alekandrov later claimed the cloned cards were "a present" from a Romanian man who told him he would be able to use them to take money from an ATM but said he had not used them.

Alekandrov's home was searched on December, 2007 and gardai recovered devices for recording PIN numbers, a bag of tools, a list of handwritten PIN's, a list of card numbers, a computer and a can of grey spray paint used to match the devices to the colour of the ATM.

During the trial, a Garda Detective said one of the devices would be attached to the slot on the ATM and would "skim" the information held on the magnetic strip as the customer inserted their card.

A second device contained a camera at the top of the machine to record the PIN as the customer entered it.

Judge Katherine Delahunt said she believed Alekandrov was a "major player" and was involved in fraud "in a fairly big way" before handing down sentences of three and four years for the various charges to run concurrently.

Judge Delahunt rejected an application by defence counsel to suspend a portion of the sentence and said she was originally considering jailing Alekandrov for six years.

(DW)