

A Turkish computer hacker who was helping that country’s media and national police investigate computer crimes was kidnapped and tortured by a notorious ATM hacker, according to a report from the Turkish press.

The victim, known online as "Kier," had been leaking information to Turkish reporters about an underground figure called Cha0, when he briefly disappeared. He resurfaced in May, and described being abducted and beaten by Cha0 and his henchmen.

A photo of Kier stripped down to his underwear and seated in a chair surfaced on the online crime forum DarkMarket, according to a source there, who provided a copy of the photo. Kier is seen holding a sign that reads in part: "I am rat. I am pig. I am reporter. I am fucked by Cha0."

Kier disappeared again shortly after describing his ordeal to two reporters at Turkey’s Haber 7, according to the report. In his last e-mail to the reporters, he claimed that Cha0 is protected by a relationship with Turkish officials. "I always had a question mark on my mind on where Cha0’s men got the resources," Kier wrote the reporters in Turkish. "I found out firsthand when I had a weapon pointed at my head."

Cha0 sent the kidnap photo to Haber 7, but later denied any role on Kier’s more recent disappearance. Cha0 then vanished himself, and Haber 7 reports that he might be in police custody.

A well known figure in the credit card fraud underground, Cha0 markets a high-quality ATM skimmer and PIN pad that fraudsters can covertly affix to certain models of cash machines. The skimmer records the magstripe data on a consumer’s debit or credit card as they feed it into an ATM, while the PIN pad overlay stores the user’s PIN. The stolen magstripe data can later be encoded onto a blank card and used to make withdrawals from victim accounts.

Cha0’s banner ad on DarkMarket shows a cartoon man wading through a house full of cash. "Is that you?," the text asks. "Yes. If you bought [a] skimmer and PIN pad from Cha0."

In April, Miami Beach police busted a ring of Bulgarian nationals who’d allegedly been planting skimmers on area ATMs for two years. The gang installed pin-hole cameras in the ceiling of the ATM to record the PIN numbers. They allegedly used the stolen data to pull more than $160,000 from bank customer accounts in the span of just two weeks last February.

The Secret Service took over the Miami Beach case, and the four defendants were each released on a $100,000 cash and signature bond. Three, including alleged ringleader Nikolai Hristov Arabov, jumped bail and went on the lam last month.