Waiters Arrested In $3M Credit Card Fraud

Workers In 40 Restaurants In Five States Engaged In Identity Theft Of Diners

(AP)  The diners didn't know it, but their credit cards were going to pay for more than their meals, prosecutors said.

Waiters in about 40 restaurants, in New York and elsewhere, quietly recorded customers' credit card information and passed it on to people who used the information to make more than $3 million worth of illegal purchases, according to prosecutors.

Thirteen people were indicted Friday on charges stemming from their roles in the credit card fraud, prosecutors said.

The credit card account information was stolen from customers who visited restaurants in Manhattan's Chinatown and other parts of the New York metropolitan area, as well eateries in Florida, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Some members of the group stole customers' information; some made the counterfeit cards; others shopped for merchandise; and finally someone bought the goods for cash, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said.

Morgenthau said 12 of the 13 people indicted are in custody and are expected to be arraigned Monday. All the defendants are being charged with fourth-degree conspiracy, punishable by up to four years in prison. Seven are also being charged with second-degree grand larceny, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years.

Authorities were still seeking one suspect, identified by prosecutors only as "John Doe."

When the 35-year-old ringleader was arrested Wednesday, Morgenthau said, police found 296 fake credit cards, $200,000 in cash, numerous Rolex watches and expensive handbags in his Brooklyn home.

The district attorney said conspiracy leaders recruited and managed people who worked as waiters and provided them with small, hand-held "skimmers" that read and recorded information on the magnetic strips of patrons' credit cards.

The leaders, some of whom worked in the restaurants with their recruits, then collected the skimming devices and paid the waiters $35 to $50 for information from each credit card stored in the devices, Morgenthau said.

He said the conspirators operated from November 2005 until this week.

The suspects used the stolen information to create counterfeit credit cards by encoding the information on high-quality credit card blanks, Morgenthau said.

[rvjrvj]

Wow. It does not pay to give your card to a waitress to pay for your meal.

[staycalm]

This happened to us two years ago at The Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The waitress at the restaurant counter copied our credit card number and somehow we started seeing charges from Louisiana. The abbreviation for Louisiana is LA and we kept searching for these strange stores that kept appearing on our statements thinking that they were located in L.A., California, not LA Louisiana. Finally Visa took over and, we think, caught the perpetrators. Now we are reluctant to hand our credit cards over to waiters and waitresses.

[nothappyatall]

"caught the perpetrators. Now we are reluctant to hand our credit cards over to waiters and waitresses."

ANYONE you give your card to is a risk, any employee anywhere who processes your card number, even over the phone can do this, the good part is that your liability is limited to $50 or in most cases zero as long as you notify the credit card company of discrepancies in your statement.
So don't worry about it, it's the bank or credit card issuer and merchants who will be taking the heat- especially the merchants who sold goods to someone without verifying ID or the card itself.
You get a store running a card with the name "Joyce Abromowitz" on it or "Minni Finch" and there's a 19-20 year old black kid with the card, well hey that says RED FLAG and if you ignore than and sell the kid the goods and run the card and it turned out to be stolen, too bad, you should have asked for a driver's license with picture ID.

[toolmangler-2009]

Wow. It does not pay to give your card to a waitress to pay for your meal.
Posted by rvjrvj at 11:53 AM : Apr 21, 2007


Maybe if we had a different way to pay for things. You know, we could call it something like 'money'. Oh!!!! I forget! It costs to much to print that stuff an it can be counterfeited an stolen an its hard to keep track of. My wife (reading over my shoulder) just told me "why dont they make everything 'FRREEEE'!!!!!

[missingamerica]

Don't make a habit of getting tipsy in bars, either - it is easy to skim somebody who is probably just going to look at their monthly statement and whistle while thinking "Wow - I guess I had a really good time!".

[maitreg]

Something similar happened to us a few years ago. We visited relatives in SC for a week, and after I got back, when our next credit card statement came, I noticed a couple of charges to two stores in a small town in Georgia, hundreds of miles from where we were. The credit card company said their records showed that somebody physically used the card at these stores. I told them that was impossible because I hadn't been to george in over 10 years and I still had the card in my hand. They didn't believe me and it took multiple letters and phone calls to get the charges taken care of, nearly two months later. The hassle that resulted probably wasn't even worth those fraudlent charges. It would have been easier to just pay them and not have to deal with the stupid credit card issuing bank.

[generey]

I wanna add to this for everybody; EVERY day when I get home from work I routinly go to my bank account & "check it". That said, a short while back, I tried to do just that and recieved a notice that my account had been "frozen". Ok. After further checking with the bank, I was informed that while someone was using my 'puter, accessing a "non-secure" website, apparently a "hacker" gained access to my 'puter and then literally watched MY keystrokes, getting my bank sign-in name and password. They must have been watching fow at least a week and, on payday after my direct deposit went in, they tried to transfer the funds in the account out to another account. My deep THANK YOU to Wachovia, 'cause somehow their computer's recognized that something was not quite right, and froze everything. My ID was not good enough; I almost had to tell them how many hairs were on my head before they would accept who I was. Turns out the kid next door had used my 'puter while I was at work, (with my wife's permission), went to a website, (which I guess I should'nt name 'cause nothing was "proved"), and that is where it happenned. BE CAREFUL PEOPLE!!! People may be watching you! Again, much thanks to Wachovia. I AM impressed.

[oleander8]

"You get a store running a card with the name "Joyce Abromowitz" on it or "Minni Finch" and there's a 19-20 year old black kid with the card, well hey that says RED FLAG..." [Posted by newster1]

With statements like that we all know racism is alive and well in the US of A. You are pathetic.

[gordon.couger]

I am programmer and I had an occasion to work on a credit card terminal. The one I worked on programed was a Intel 386 that had a program in Borland Turbo C 3.2 [free on the net] and is very straight forward to program. It uses a 1200 baud modem that uses a Hays command set.

Fast forward a few years and I was drinking coffee in a paint store that had just had to guys come in that said they were there to reprogram the credit card terminal. When they ask for a card and called the credit card clearing service the two guys left in a hurry.

We never knew what they were up to. They were probably just change clearing agencies. But the could do a lot more.

It would not be too difficult to down load the program from a credit card terminal and take it home and patch it to secretly store or send you credit card data. The go back and install it. I won't go into details but its not rocket science.

If there were only 2 or 3 of you and no one got greedy you could steal a lot of money.

GC

[toolmangler-2009]

"You get a store running a card with the name "Joyce Abromowitz" on it or "Minni Finch" and there's a 19-20 year old black kid with the card, well hey that says RED FLAG..." [Posted by newster1]

"With statements like that we all know racism is alive and well in the US of A. You are pathetic."
Posted by oleander8 at 07:35 PM : Apr 21, 2007



Yeah! And if you and others like you would give it a rest, MAYBE we might have a generation grow up without thinking "RACE". As a child I learned the 'N' word from the black kids in my class. My family refused to use those kinds of words.

[cg37102006]

Huh, life imitates art once again. I believe this was the plot line for a series of Sopranos episodes last year. Restaurant involvement in credit card fraud I refer to.

[djermano1]

Credit Cards should not be used, but outlawed. What should take its place are credit-checks.

These credit-checks are paper checks that are submitted with the persons photo on it. The information can not be scanned, but numbers reflect the routing to the bank, where the bank managers use the routing number to locate the account number.

This way people do not have access to individual account numbers. The business establishment would be required use digital cameras to take the picture of the customer paying with their photo credit-checks. The business sends their photo with the credit-check to the bank for payment.

Banks would be required to contact owners of the credit-checks via text message on their phones or computer to see if they authorized these transactions. They can not say no...if the business has their picture via the digital camera upon their purchase.

This plan would protect both parties in the business transaction, and stop banking theft.

Americans are such rip off artists. It only hurts America's reputation more and more.

Get on the ball and start making and developing this system.

[harp1963]

"Don't aspire to be like the gilded weather vane on top of a great building. However much it may glitter, however high it may be, it adds nothing to the structure.
Rather be like an old stone block hidden in the foundation, under the ground where no one can see you. Because of you, the house will not fall." (Saint Josemaria Escriva', The Way, 590)

[calico91]

A friend had identify theft committed against his bank account to the tune of $10,000. The bank did not reimburse him, so don't assume that the banks or credit card companies will pick up the loss.

[toolmangler-2009]

Not to worry, Big Brother has already got you printed and numbered. A simple RFID chip the size of a grain of Rice will tranfer your info to a scanner and then debit your account for any purchases. It will make your past an open book to anybody that cares to look. 'course your past will be rather bland since 'all' radicals of any form will have been 'weeded' out of society.

[frankinaz]

I had my mail stolen, and someone opened a Capital One credit card in my name. It took that company nearly a month to send me a letter verifying the information they received on me was correct, but it was not. They issued these crooks a credit card in my name anyway, putting the proverbial "Cart before the horse." What's in your wallet? I can say someone sure tried to take money out of mine. Luckily, Capital One did not hold me liable, so I am grateful for that. However, I now have to pay for my credit report services and be ever-vigilant for fraudulent activity. In this age of convenience, there are many ways for criminals to rip-off innocent people.