NY officials: ID theft ring stole from victims who used credit cards at Mesquite gas station

[Erica Absetz <erica () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2013/05/ny-officials-id-theft-ring-stole-from-victims-who-used-credit-cards-at-mesquite-gas-station.html/

New York officials said alleged members of an identity theft ring used
an electronic encoder and other tools inside a Manhattan hotel room to
steal money from nearly 400 people who used credit and debit cards at
a Mesquite gas station.

The four suspects are accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of
dollars from the victims.

Garegin Spartalyan, 40, Aram Martirosian, 34, Hayk Dzhandzhapanyan,
40, and Davit Kudugulyan, 42, were charged this week in New York in a
405-count indictment with various offenses including grand larceny and
possession of stolen property, officials said.

“A Manhattan hotel room was transformed into a veritable identity
theft factory by the defendants charged in this case,” said Manhattan
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. “None of the nearly 400 people
who swiped their credit and ATM cards at a gas station in Mesquite,
Texas could have possibly fathomed that their stolen financial data
would wind up a hotel room some 1,500 miles away in New York.”

The suspects made hundreds of fake credit and debit cards using the
account information stolen from those who used their cards to pay for
gas at a Raceway in Mesquite, according to New York officials.

(The address of the gas station was not released. There are two
Raceways in the city).

The thieves used the stolen account information to encode blank cards,
which they then used in March to withdraw money from the victims’
accounts at Manhattan ATM machines, officials said.

Spartalyan and Martirosian were arrested March 21 while withdrawing
money from the victims’ checking accounts. Authorities said they each
had thousands of dollars as well as more than 80 forged cards, some of
which had PIN numbers printed on them.

Police searched their room at the Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown
Manhattan and found an encoder, laptops and modems, which were used to
forge the credit and debit cards, officials said. An encoder is used
to electronically place data onto a card’s magnetic strip.

Police recovered about $340,000 and 400 forged credit cards from the
defendants and from inside their hotel room.

Spartalyan and Martirosian are from Las Vegas. The other two are from
California.

New York officials are still investigating how the suspects obtained
the stolen account information.

But in other cases, thieves have done so using a card “skimming”
device that is attached to gas pumps and which looks like a legitimate
card swipe device.
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