For anybody who is unfamiliar with it. Queens is one of New York City's five boroughs. It is the home of the New York Mets, JFK and LaGuardia airports, the US Open tennis tournament and now, the biggest identity theft bust in US history.
Restaurant workers, bank tellers and other service employees skimmed, swiped and scammed millions of dollars worth of personal credit information from thousands of American and European consumers. The cost to victims, financial institutions and retail business was more than $13 million over a 16-month period. Now 111 people are charged and 86 are in custody.
In New York, employees of banks, retail outlets and restaurants would skim credit card information while swiping customers' credit cards. Others were tasked with stealing credit card information online. The numbers were then handed off to teams who, using blank credit cards from overseas, forged Visas, MasterCards, Discover and American Express cards as well as fake IDs.
Sometimes the alleged crooks would employ an “impersonator,” an individual who contacted financial institutions or retail stores and impersonated the true cardholder to check on the actual cardholders' credit. After all, they probably didn't want to get charged fees for going over their credit limits.
Anyway…
The bogus plastic was turned over to teams who went on spending sprees at higher-end stores including Apple, Bloomingdale's and Macy's in New York, Florida, Massachusetts and Los Angeles. During these shopping sprees, criminals used forged credit cards to stay at such five-star hotels as the Fontainebleau and The Royal Palm in Miami Beach and the high-end private villas of the El Conquistador in Puerto Rico. They are also alleged to have used forged credit cards to rent Lamborghinis and Porsches and, in one instance, a private jet to take them from New York to Florida.
The groups would then resell the merchandise that included iPads, iPhones, computers, watches and upscale handbags from Gucci and Louis Vuitton in China, Europe and the Middle East.
In addition to credit card fraud, twenty-four defendants were variously charged with burglaries and robberies throughout Queens County, including conspiring to commit a bank robbery. Five are charged with stealing more than $95,000 worth of cargo from Kennedy Airport and seven of stealing approximately $850,000 worth of computer equipment from the Citigroup Building in Long Island City.
“This is by far the largest – and certainly among the most sophisticated – identity theft/credit card fraud cases that law enforcement has come across,” said District Attorney Brown. “Credit card fraud and identity theft are two of the fastest growing crimes in the United States, afflicting millions of victims and costing billions of dollars in losses to consumers, businesses and financial institutions…. Even after the culprits are caught and prosecuted, their victims are still faced with the difficult task of having to repair their credit ratings and financial reputations. In some cases, that process can take years.”
The investigation involved physical surveillance, intelligence gathering and court-authorized electronic eavesdropping on dozens of different telephones in which thousands of conversations were intercepted. Many required translation from Russian, Mandarin and Arabic to English.
Indictments charge that Imran Khan, Ali Khweiss, Anthony Martin, Sanjay (a/k/a/ Rocky) Deowsarran and Amar Singh were “bosses” of the criminal enterprise.
In what could be considered an act of irony or chutzpa or both, one defendant, Nelson Feliciano, who owns a security firm, allegedly allowed others to make a counterfeit credit card using his business account information and to use that account to make $50,000 in purchases before claiming that the charges were fraudulent and that he was a victim of identity theft.
The indictment also alleges that Jonathan Ortiz, Wilfred Rodriguez, Travis Hassang, Angel Quinones and two other individuals, who have not been apprehended, were charged with stealing approximately $850,000 in computer equipment. In a stirring demonstration of motherly devotion, Jonathan Ortiz's mother, Maria, has been charged with hindering prosecution by logging into her son's Facebook account to create an alibi for him – allegedly. Now, don't you just hate it when parents insist on checking what their kids do online
Govinfosecurity.com's Managing Editor, Tracy Kitten , gathered analysis from security experts:
Gartner's Avivah Litan , says “I think this does point out that US law enforcement has beefed up multilingual capabilities in Russian, Mandarin and Arabic, which is critical to its activities, and is a big improvement over the situation pre- 9/11.”
Aite Group's Julie McNelley observes, “While the operation spanned the five continents, the focus of this bust appears to be the hub of the operation in Queens.”
Security author and writer Neal O'Farrell notes, “We know there are scams like this being run in almost every city, usually in the $500,000 to $1 million range. That usually makes them too big for local law enforcement to investigate and too small for federal agencies to pick up. The big problem we're seeing is that because the low- to mid-level crooks and gangs are going unchallenged, they simply have more time to get better, perfect their art, steal more, and hide their tracks. By the time law enforcement uncovers them, there's little left to prosecute.”
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