Ventura County Sheriff's Department

Location: Bank of America 2345 Borchard Road Newbury Park, Ca.
Date & Time/ RB#: Jan. 16, 2009 / 8:00 p.m. / 09-1467
Unit Responsible: Thousand Oaks Police Department Forgery / Fraud Investigations
(S)uspects, (V)ictims, (W)itnesses Address Age
(S) Paun, Bogdan Los Angeles 39

Sheriff’s deputies arrested a Los Angeles man recently for installing and using a skimming device on a Newbury Park bank’s automated teller machine.
An alert witness saw 39-year-old Bogdan Paun walk up to the drive-through ATM on January 16, 2009. Paun returned to a vehicle that was parked in the parking lot. He remained in the parking lot, but then walked back to the ATM a short time later.
The witness used the ATM and saw that one of the two machines had an out-of-order sign posted on it. The witness used the adjacent machine, but noticed something looked different on the ATM. He notified the sheriff’s department and gave a detailed description of Paun as well as Paun’s vehicle, including the license plate number.
Deputies arrived and contacted the witness, who provided details of what he had seen. As deputies interviewed the witness, Paun returned to the parking lot, where deputies detained him. The investigation revealed a skimming device attached to the ATM, along with a surveillance camera system. Deputies found additional evidence inside Paun’s vehicle linking him to the skimming of account numbers via the ATM.
Paun was arrested and booked for identity theft and using a scanning device. Paun remains in custody at the Pre-Trial Detention Facility with bail set at $250,000.00.
Skimming has become a significant problem nationwide. The crime involves attaching a
professionally made device to an ATM that electronically captures account numbers from customers’ bankcards when the cards are inserted or swiped in the machine. There is always a surveillance camera attached somewhere on or near the machine to capture corresponding personal identification numbers (PINs) when customers enter their security codes.
Armed with account numbers and corresponding PINs, the suspects can then encode the information on blank cards and access funds from victims’ bank accounts anywhere in the world.
Bank of America officials estimate that skimming costs their banks tens of millions of dollars per year in Southern California alone. No particular bank or ATM is immune from this type of crime.