Police identify ATM robbers

AMMAN — Police on Monday said they had identified the suspects who reportedly stole money from two ATMs in the capital over the weekend.

The Public Security Department (PSD) media office said that Criminal Investigation Department personnel identified the perpetrators as three Romanians, who came to Jordan for a short period and rented an apartment in the capital.

A PSD statement made available to The Jordan Times said the three Romanian nationals left the Kingdom immediately after committing the theft, adding that an official request has been sent to Interpol to circulate them as "wanted in Jordan". 

An official from the Jordan Kuwait Bank in Amman on Monday said the suspects targeted two of the bank's ATMs in the capital's Marj Hamam and Rawnaq neighbourhoods.

“The robbers managed to withdraw cash from the machines on Friday night using sophisticated technological methods without destroying the ATMs,” the bank official told The Jordan Times.

He noted that the amount taken was not that large since ATMs are “filled daily with amounts ranging between JD10,000 to JD15,000”.

The PSD said its cyber-crime teams identified a new method of stealing from ATMs that has never been used before in the Kingdom, but has been recently utilised in many countries around the world.

This is the second incident to target ATMs in the capital in the past month. On November 4, police said four suspects extracted two ATMs from a mall and a restaurant that reportedly netted JD100,000.