ATM thief pleads guilty

A Romanian man admitted Monday to his role in a scheme that placed skimming devices on ATMs to steal customer bank account numbers and PINs, prosecutors in Connecticut announced. Victor Constantin, 23, pleaded guilty to one count each of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. He and co-conspirators used the devices, which included pinhole cameras, to capture the data encoded on the magnetic stripe of the bank cards, as well as PINs that victims punched in to the cash machines. They used this information to create fake cards, resulting in theft of $150,000 from Bank of America. Constantin faces up to 32 years in prison. — DK