Tracking A Bluetooth Skimmer Gang In Mexico

[dlevere]

Tracking Bluetooth Skimmers in Mexico, Part II

By Brian Krebs

As I noted in yesterday’s story, the skimmers that this gang is placing in hacked ATM's consist of two Bluetooth components: One connected to the card reader inside each machine, and another attached to the PIN pad. Both components beacon out a Bluetooth signal called “Free2Move.” The thieves can retrieve the purloined card and PIN data just by strolling up to the hacked ATM with a smartphone, entering a secret passcode, and downloading all of the collected information.

Having found two hacked ATM's in Cancun — including one in the lobby of my hotel (the Marriott CasaMagna) — I decided to check out other tourist destinations in the region. On the way to Tulum, I dropped in at the Barcelo, a huge, all-inclusive resort. The security guards at the front gate at the resort initially prevented me from entering the complex because I didn’t have reservations.

After 10 minutes of Googling on my phone and a call to the front desk, the guards seemed satisfied that I was interested in buying a day pass to the hotel’s various facilities. The gate lifted and I was let in. Five minutes later, the very first ATM I stopped at was found to be emanating the telltale Free2Move Bluetooth signals indicating a compromise.

No sooner had I finished documenting that hacked ATM than a security guard rode up on a motorcycle and asked if I was having trouble finding the day-pass desk. I replied that I’d be headed that way shortly.

The Barcelo security guard followed me closely as I returned to my rented Jetta and drove to a different building in the complex. Multiple security guards were beginning to shadow me at a respectful distance. I decided it was best to at least demonstrate that I had an intention of buying a day pass.

The Barcelo reception desk said the price would be USD $80 per person. Feigning shock over the hefty pricetag, I declared loudly that I had to hit the hotel’s ATM to withdraw more cash in order to pay such exorbitant prices. That ATM also was beaconing the Free2Move Bluetooth signal, but the ATM itself returned errors stating that it was temporarily offline and unable to dispense cash.

That outage turned out to be the perfect excuse to visit a third ATM in the complex, as I again loudly explained to the security guy following a few paces behind. By this point, a much more stern and beefy guard began following me around on foot, his walkie-talkie buzzing periodically as I crossed the hotel campus. The third and final ATM I checked also was compromised. While I was sure there were more ATM's I hadn’t checked in other areas of the resort, I decided not to press my luck, and hopped back in the Jetta and resumed my journey to Tulum.

TULUM

Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along the ATM skimmer I’d received from a source instead of leaving it in the hotel safe. If the cops searched my stuff, how could I explain having ultra-sophisticated Bluetooth ATM skimmer components in my backpack?


A sign across the street from the police department in Tulum.

After several nervous minutes of creeping traffic, I was waved on through the checkpoint and immediately felt silly for having gotten so worked up about it. However, upon my arrival 20 minutes later in Tulum — a popular tourist destination due to its proximity to the Mayan ruins — I would have a much closer encounter with the police.

As I pulled into the area where tour buses normally drop off passengers by the hundreds each hour, a number of men stood waving pamphlets and offering “Cheap!” parking that was anything but (or at least I thought at the time). Each was trying to direct me to park the Volkswagen in one of several large, dusty lots.

“I’ll just be about five minutes,” I said, stupidly putting the vehicle in park on the main street right in front of the tourist lot. The attendants just shook their heads and began hailing other newcomers.

The Tulum visit yielded another three ATM's within a few hundred meters of each other that were all emanating the FreetoMove signal. But unfortunately, that jaunt took more than five minutes: When I returned to the Volkswagen, I found a parking ticket on the windshield and the parking attendants smirking, gleefully shouting in Spanish that I should have listened to them and parked in their lot.

The ticket wasn’t for that much money. More concerning, the license plate had been removed from the front of the car. At first I thought someone had stolen it, but one of the locals explained that this was a common practice used by Mexican police to ensure people actually pay quickly and — more importantly for them — locally, for their parking and traffic fines (and then some). The removal of the plates from the rented vehicle necessitated a stop at the police station at the entrance to the ruins; 20 minutes and the equivalent of $200 later, I was back in possession of the car’s front plate and headed back toward Cancun.

PLAYA DEL CARMEN


Yours Truly, in front of a hacked ATM in Playa Del Carmen.

My next stop was Playa Del Carmen, another tourist destination popular with Americans but quite a bit less rowdy than the Plaza Caracol nightclub area in Cancun. A lengthy and sweaty stroll down Playa del Carmen’s leafy 5th Avenue revealed five more compromised ATM's pulsing out the Free2Move bluetooth signals.

After a late and thankfully enormous lunch at a local Argentinian steakhouse, I was feeling refreshed enough to continue to the third leg of the journey. With twilight approaching and colorfully lit signs blazing to life along the main tourist boulevard, a steady breeze set in and mercifully tamed the otherwise sticky and oppressive heat. It was time to board the hourly ferry to Cozumel.

COZUMEL

This speedy cruiser takes riders on a 45 minute ride to Cozumel, an island whose surrounding deep green-blue clear water makes it an immensely popular spot for scuba divers and tourists alike. By this time, the fitness tracker on my arm tapped my wrist to report that I’d massively overachieved my daily fitness goal: I’d walked almost 13 miles at that point, and I hadn’t even strolled around Cozumel yet.


A compromised ATM in Cozumel.

Once off the ferry in Cozumel, I commenced about two more kilometers of walking the main commercial road adjacent to the ferry dock. I found four more apparently hacked ATM's that were blasting out the telltale bluetooth signals.

I was physically drained, but very happy with the results of my reconnaissance missions, and glad to have been able to see so many places on the coast in such a short time.

I arrived back at the CasaMagna Marriott after midnight, exhausted but also interested in stopping by the ATM to see if any action had been taken. To my astonishment, someone had finally unplugged the Cardtronics peso machine that was stealing card data and PIN's from users. With the power to the hacked ATM unplugged, the Free2Move beacons were no longer transmitting.

Unfortunately, I had to catch a flight home the next morning. But as the taxi dropped me off in front of the airport, I decided to check all of the cash machines in the terminal. The first one I found just inside the check-in area was clean (at least it didn’t appear to be beaconing bluetooth signals). The second ATM, however — situated next to an escalator and a currency exchange shop but before the security screening checkpoint — was broadcasting the now familiar bluetooth signal.


This woman raced ahead of me as I was filming this compromised ATM. She was successfully dissuaded from using it.

As I prepared to document the compromise on my GoPro camera, an apparently American woman raced ahead of me and beat met to the ATM. Before she could enter her PIN, I turned off the camera and explained who I was. The traveler replied that she was in a great hurry. I told her that the ATM she was about to use would soon cause her checking account to be hijacked and drained.

The woman looked at me in what seemed to be exasperation for a moment, before withdrawing her card from the machine and heading wordlessly across the airport lobby to the other ATM.

Packing my camera gear back into its case, I carefully peered around the backside of the ATM. I noticed it was plugged into the wall facing the escalator.

As I rode the escalator up to the security gates and gazed down over the handrail, I could no longer see the darkened screen of the ATM, but somehow neither was the power cord still attached to the wall. Pulling out my new Hauwei phone for the last time, I smiled as the Bluetooth scanner tried in vain to find any beacons.

Later this week, we’ll take a look at the shadowy organization that appears to be responsible for this crime spree.

[dlevere]

By Brian Krebs

-Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m. CT, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico: Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along the ATM skimmer instead of leaving it in the hotel safe. If the cops searched my stuff, how could I explain having ultra-sophisticated Bluetooth ATM skimmer components in my backpack?

The above paragraph is an excerpt that I pulled from the body of Part II in this series of articles and video essays stemming from a recent four-day trip to Mexico. During that trip, I found at least 19 different ATM's that all apparently had been hacked from the inside and retrofitted with tiny, sophisticated devices that store and transmit stolen card data and PINs wirelessly.

In June 2015, I heard from a source at an ATM firm who wanted advice and help in reaching out to the right people about what he described as an ongoing ATM fraud campaign of unprecedented sophistication, organization and breadth. Given my focus on ATM skimming technology and innovations, I was immediately interested.

My source asked to have his name and that of his employer omitted from the story because he fears potential reprisals from the alleged organized criminal perpetrators of this scam. According to my source, several of his employer’s ATM installation and maintenance technicians in the Cancun area reported recently being approached by men with Eastern European accents, asking each tech if he would be interested in making more than 100 times his monthly salary just for providing direct, physical access to the inside of a single ATM that the technician served.

One of my sources co-workers was later found to have accepted the bribes, which apparently had only grown larger and more aggressive after technicians in charge of specific, very busy ATM's initially declined an initial offer.

My source said his company fired the rogue employee who’d taken the bait, but that the employee’s actions had still be useful because experts were now able to examine the skimming technology first-hand. The company tested the hardware by installing it into ATM's that were not in service. When they turned the devices on, they discovered each component was beaconing out the same Bluetooth signal: “Free2Move.”

Turns out, Free2Move is the default name for a bluetooth beacon in a component made by a legitimate wireless communications company of the same name. I also located a sales thread in a dubious looking site that specializes in offering this technology in mini form for ATM PIN pads and card readers for $550 per component (although the site claims it won’t sell the products to scammers).

The Bluetooth circuit boards allegedly supplied by the Eastern Europeans who bribed my source’s technician were made to be discretely wired directly onto the electronic ATM circuit boards which independently serve the machine’s debit card reader and PIN pad.

Each of the bluetooth circuit boards are tiny — wafer thin and about 1 cm wide by 2 cm long. Each also comes with its own data storage device. Stolen card data can be retrieved from the bluetooth components wirelessly: The thief merely needs to be within a few meters of the compromised ATM to pull stolen card data and PIN's off the devices, providing he has the secret key needed to access that bluetooth wireless connection.

Even if you knew the initial PIN code to connect to the Bluetooth wireless component on the ATM — the stolen data that is sent by the bluetooth components is encrypted. Decrypting that data requires a private key that ostensibly only the owners of this crimeware possess.

These are not your ordinary skimming devices. Most skimmers are detectable because they are designed to be affixed to the outside of the ATM's. But with direct, internal access to carefully targeted cash machines, the devices could sit for months or even years inside of compromised ATM's before being detected (depending in part on how quickly and smartly the thieves used or sold the stolen card numbers and PIN's).

Not long after figuring out the scheme used by this skimmer, my source instructed his contacts in Cancun and the surrounding area to survey various ATM's in the region to see if any of these machines were emitting a Bluetooth signal called “Free2Move.” Sure enough, the area was blanketed with cash machines spitting out Free2Move signals.

Going to the cops would be useless at best, and potentially dangerous; Mexico’s police force is notoriously corrupt, and for all my source knew the skimmer scammers were paying for their own protection from the police.

Rather, he said he wanted to figure out a way to spot compromised ATM's where those systems were deployed across Mexico (but mainly in the areas popular with tourists from Europe and The United States).

When my source said he knew where I could obtain one of these skimmers in Mexico firsthand, I volunteered to scour the tourist areas in and around Cancun to look for ATM's spitting out the Free2Move bluetooth signal.

I’d worked especially hard the previous two months: So much so that July and August were record traffic months for KrebsOnSecurity, with several big breach stories bringing more than a million new readers to the site. It was time to schedule a quasi-vacation, and this was the perfect excuse. I had a huge pile of frequent flier miles burning a hole in my pocket, and I wasted no time in using those miles to book a hotel and flight to Cancun.

CANCUN

There are countless luxury hotels and resorts in Cancun, but it turned out that the very hotel I picked — the Marriott CasaMagna Hotel — had an ATM in its lobby that was beaconing the Free2Move signal! I had only just arrived and had potentially discovered my first compromised ATM.


View from the Marriott CasaMaga Hotel in Cancun.

However, I noticed with disappointment that for some reason all of my Apple devices — an iPhone 5, a late-model iPad, and my Macbook Pro — had trouble reliably detecting and holding the Free2Move signals from one of the two ATM's situated in the hotel lobby.

I decided that I needed a more reliable (and disposable) phone, so I hopped in the rental car for a quick jaunt down the road to the local TelCel store (TelCel is Mexico’s dominant mobile provider and a company owned by the world’s second-richest man — Carlos Slim.

After perusing their phones, I selected a Huawei Android phone because — at around USD $117 — it was among the cheapest smartphones available in the store. Also, the phone came with plenty of call minutes and a semi-decent data allowance, so I could now avoid monstrous voice and data roaming charges for using my iPhone in Mexico.


Tourist attractions next to Plaza Caracol.

Nearby the TelCel store was Plaza Caracol — a mall adjacent to a huge tourist nightlife area that is boisterous and full of American and Brits on holiday. The car parked in the mall’s garage, I pulled out my new Huawei phone and turned on its bluetooth scanning application. The first ATM I found — a machine managed by ATM giant Cardtronics — quickly showed it was beaconing two Free2Move signals.

Returning to the Marriott hotel, I found that the two Free2Move bluetooth signals showed up consistently and reliably on my new phone’s screen after about 5 seconds of searching for nearby bluetooth connections. The compromised ATM in the hotel also was a Cardtronics system.

At this point, I went to the front desk, introduced myself and asked to speak to the person in charge of security at the CasaMagna. Before long, I was speaking with no fewer than six employees from the hotel, all of us seated around a small coffee table overlooking the crystal-blue ocean and the pool. I explained the situation and everyone seemed to be very concerned, serious, asking smart questions and nodding their heads.

A man who introduced himself as the hotel’s loss prevention manager disclosed that Marriott had recently received complaints from a number of guests at the hotel who saw fraud on their debit cards shortly after using their ATM cards at the hotel’s machine. The loss prevention guy said the company responsible for the ATM — Cardtronics — had already sent someone out to review the integrity of the machine, but that this technician could not find anything wrong.

[SIDE NOTE: That technician may have only inspected the exterior of the machine before giving it a clean bill of health. Another explanation is that the technician that was sent to find skimming devices didn’t report their presence because he was the one who installed them in the first place!]

That same day, I phoned Giovanni Locandro, senior vice president of North American business development at Cardtronics. He told me the company conducts periodic “sweeps” in Mexico to look for skimming devices on its machines and that it was in the process of doing one at the moment down there, although he didn’t acknowledge whether he was familiar with the exact scheme I was describing.

“We are doing another sweep as we speak down there,” Locandro said. “We do random sweeps, especially in tourist areas to check for those devices. But we haven’t heard of any cards being cloned. Any devices we receive we take those to our internal security folks, and then we contact the authorities.”


I couldn’t dissuade these young ladies and many others from using the compromised machine on our second evening at the hotel.

I showed the hotel folks the bluetooth beacons emanating from the ATM's in the lobby, and showed them how to conduct the same scans on their phones. Everyone roundly agreed that the technician had to be called again. But there were two ATM's in the lobby — one dispensing Mexico Pesos and another dispensing only dollars. How to know which ATM is compromised, they asked? Unplug them one by one, I replied, and you’ll see very quickly which cash machine is hacked because the bluetooth beacon would shut off.

Despite more head nods and a round of verbal agreement from the hotel staff that this was a good idea, to my surprise nobody at the hotel bothered to touch the machine for two more days. I watched countless people withdraw money from the hacked ATM; some of those I warned while in the lobby were appreciative and seemed to grasp that perhaps it was best to wait for another ATM; others were less receptive and continued with their transactions.

The next morning — after verifying that the hotel’s ATM was still compromised and trying in vain to hail the security folks again at the hotel — I headed out in the rental car. I was eager to visit some of the other more popular tourist destinations about an hour to the south of Cancun, including Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Cozumel. I wanted to see how many of those towns were hacked by this same skimming crew.

I was about to learn that the true scope of this scam was far larger than I’d imagined.

Stay tuned for Part II in this series later this week.