Two Chinese citizens were sentenced to one year in jail and fined Rs50,000 by a local court on Monday for their involvement in ATM fraud in Karachi.

Akbar Khan, a cybercrimes investigator, said Zhong Xiaming and Zhong Xianquan were arrested a year ago while attaching a skimming device to an ATM.

The foreigners were arrested in Bahadurabad and handed over to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), where a case was registered against them.

The FIA today told the court that the convicts withdrew cash and installed skimming devices in ATMs. The FIA had also recovered Rs600,000 from the possession of the Chinese citizens.

On the rise in recent days, the incidents of ATM skimming in Karachi appear to have first surfaced in 2016. The criminals used skimmers to capture banking data off debit and credit cards.

Skimmers are physical devices that are installed over the actual ATM card slots that read the data of the magnetic strips. They are often used in conjunction with hidden cameras that can film PIN numbers.

Skimming seems to have become more frequent and widespread since then ─ taking place in Rawalpindi and Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

An executive at a bank from which over Rs10m had been stolen last year told Dawn earlier that the transactions had been traced to Indonesia, China and other countries.

Several foreigners have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from banks using skimming devices at ATM facilities.