CHIANG MAI — Two foreigners have been arrested with 115 fake ATM cards allegedly used to withdraw about 15 million baht in cash in this northern city.
Provincial Police Region 5 police captured Ivan Todorov and Pavel Petrov at a hotel on Sunday night and took them for a news conference on Tuesday.
Mr Todorov, 43, carries both Canadian and Bulgarian passports and was born in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, while Mr Petrov, 45, is a Bulgarian national.
Pacha Rattanaphan, the regional police deputy commander, said on Tuesday the arrest followed a request from Kasikornbank's head office in Bangkok to look for suspects, possibly foreigners, after the bank detected a suspiciously high amount of cash being withdrawn from its machines on Tha Phae Road and neighbouring areas in the city.
The bank sent the images of the suspects to the police who used them to track the target. They found the two at a shop on the road and followed them to separate ATMs before returning to the hotel.
Police then raided their room, seized cash totalling 60,000 baht, 115 fake cards, one record book, five mobile phones and two SIM cards. All were taken to the Muang police station to file charges of using counterfeit electronic cards.
An initial investigation found the data in the bogus cards had been scammed from France by a criminal gang that sent the two to pull cash from Thailand, according to Pol Maj Gen Pacha. About 15 million baht had been taken from several machines and transferred to the overseas criminals, he added.