Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogi.

We're covering a fascinating story today.

My guest is Paul Radu, based in Romania.

Paul is the co-founder and executive director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the OCCRP.

He's held numerous prestigious fellowships and won a number of awards for his work,

including the Knight International Journalism Award, the Daniel Pearl Award for

Outstanding International Investigative Reporting and the European Press Prize.

Thank you for joining me, Paul.

Thank you for inviting.

We're talking today about your most recent project,

uncovering an international team of ATM, that is cash machine skimmers.

I don't want to say more because I'd rather people heard the story from you.

So why don't you start by just explaining to us what skimming is, and then we can back into the story from there?

First of all, I mean, skimming is a simple process.

Schimming is the process of attaching a scheming device, a device to copy a bank card data when the card is inserted in an ATM.

The scheming device copies the data from the brown strip of the card.

At the same time, a small pinhole camera that's also installed on the ATM will copy the

pin number.

So with the pin number and with the card data, the schemers can create a new bank card, can clone the old card, you know, into a new card that can be then used to steal money from one's bank account.

So in this sort of old school skimming, if you like, somebody needs to have access to the machines on a regular basis to get access to the camera that is

filmed you entering your password and the codes themselves. Yes, indeed. And sometimes they don't

...