According to Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) there’s a professional group of swindlers working in post-Soviet nations using malicious emails to spread hacking programs designed to infiltrate bank computers and steal valuable data on customers and bank accounts.

The NSS says the group has hacked a bank in Armenia by sending a series of emails to bank employees ostensibly sent from a government agency. Once opened, the emails generated programs that infiltrated the bank’s computer system.

The group was thus able to hack the bank’s ATMs. Afterwards, group members traveled to twenty-two of the bank’s ATMs in Yerevan and Abovyan and, by a series of keyboard instructions, stole 133 million AMD (approximately US$273,000).

While the NSS says it has identified the three culprits (see above) and that an international manhunt has been launched to apprehend them.