Cloaking himself in nine aliases and Armani jackets, he was a smooth, multilingual master of the con.

[Previously,] small-time crooks had made crude forays ... but in its size and technical sophistication, investigators say, [this] is a con of an entirely different order.

No one can say precisely how much is lost ... In fact, no government agency knows how many, ... where, ... or who ...

A former president said: "You write your story and [the industry] will hate it because it will say, `Be careful where you stick your card.'"

"When I found out what he was doing I thought, `Ah, the perfect scheme.'"

"They would go in, hit one, get on a subway, then go to the next one."

"Our hard and fast policy is we just don't discuss these sorts of things," a spokeswoman said.