Two for­eign na­tion­als were sen­tenced to two years’ hard labour yes­ter­day af­ter plead­ing guilty to charges aris­ing from an au­to­mat­ic teller ma­chine (ATM) rig­ging in­ci­dent which oc­curred last Sun­day.

Fran­cis­co Javier Gil Rivera, 27, a Mex­i­can na­tion­al, and Si­mon Ed­uar­do Farias Romero, 33, a Venezue­lan na­tion­al, both plead­ed guilty to two counts of traf­fick­ing in coun­ter­feit cards and one count of pos­ses­sion of card-mak­ing equip­ment when they ap­peared be­fore Mag­is­trate Aden Stroude in the Ari­ma First Mag­is­trates’ Court.

The two were ar­rest­ed on the 15th De­cem­ber, af­ter they were found to be in­volved in an ATM rig­ging in­ci­dent in Trinci­ty mall.

Ac­cord­ing to po­lice re­ports, on De­cem­ber 15th, of­fi­cers as­signed to the Fraud Squad ATM Task Force led by Cpl (Ag.) Now­butt and un­der the su­per­vi­sion of ASP Julien, were on ATM pa­trol and sur­veil­lance du­ties in the North­ern Di­vi­sion when based on in­tel­li­gence re­ceived, the of­fi­cers had cause to pay par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion to the Sco­tia­bank ATM lo­cat­ed at Trinci­ty mall.

The of­fi­cers ob­served the ma­chine to be rigged with a for­eign de­vice name­ly a grey pan­el which was af­fixed to the top of the screen of the ATM. The of­fi­cers po­si­tioned them­selves strate­gi­cal­ly and paid sur­veil­lance to the ma­chine in an at­tempt to iden­ti­fy the per­pe­tra­tors.

Lat­er around 4.30 pm, the of­fi­cers ob­served two men ap­proach the ma­chine and re­move the de­vice.

The of­fi­cers ap­pre­hend­ed both men and con­duct­ed a search. Up­on car­ry­ing out a search of Gil Rivera, the of­fi­cers found one grey coloured plas­tic pan­el con­tain­ing bat­ter­ies, elec­tri­cal cir­cuits, a mem­o­ry card and a pin­hole cam­era, along with thir­teen (13) cards bear­ing mag­net­ic strips.

Up­on search­ing Farias Romero, the of­fi­cers found sev­en (7) cards bear­ing mag­net­ic strips. Both sus­pects were ar­rest­ed and tak­en to the Fraud Squad of­fice in Port-of-Spain.

The cards were lat­er found to con­tain bank­ing in­for­ma­tion of var­i­ous cus­tomers.

A search war­rant was lat­er ex­e­cut­ed at a lo­ca­tion in Pe­tit Val­ley where both sus­pects resided and a fur­ther four­teen (14) cards were found and seized.

These cards were al­so found to con­tain bank­ing in­for­ma­tion of oth­er cus­tomers.