43
Alert Hubbard bank employees act quickly to help catch alleged ‘skimmers’
By Ed Runyan
HUBBARD
Two Brazilian men have remained in the Trumbull County jail since their Nov. 14 arrest after two alert Cortland Bank branch employees helped police and the FBI track them down on suspicion of using ATM skimmers.
A federal grand jury is considering charges against Felipe Pena, 27, and Antonio Oliveira-Neto, 26, on allegations of possessing ATM skimming devices.
Skimming devices are used to steal credit- and debit-card information from people using ATMs or other electronic readers.
Investigators got a lead when a drive-through teller at the West Liberty Street Cortland Bank noticed her video display from the bank’s ATM camera was blacked out.
A bank employee knew two days earlier someone had covered the lens of the bank’s ATM camera while making illegal withdrawals using fraudulent cards, according to court documents.
The bank employee noticed when that happened again Nov. 14 and used a cellphone camera to take a picture of two men in a car that had pulled up to the ATM about the time the lens was covered.
Police spotted the car at a gas station about two miles away and arrested Pena and Oliveira-Neto.
“They were looking at the camera at the right time, and they were able to act quickly,” Melanie Christie, director of security for Cortland Banks, said of the two employees.
Christie said the cellphone photo was significant, but the bank also accessed footage from the ATM camera before and after the tape was applied.
“As they pulled up, before they were doing that, we were able to get some images that way,” Christie said.
“That helped the branch identify the two individuals the police have in custody,” she said.
The thefts attributed to the two men did not affect the accounts of any Cortland Bank customers, and Christie said this is the first time since at least 2009 she’s aware this type of theft has occurred at a Cortland Bank branch.
After the suspects were in custody, investigators searched a storage unit the men rented in Cleveland and found skimming devices inside. Such devices typically are placed over or inside the mouth of the card slot of an ATM to create a false front, according to federal documents. They are often attached using glue.
The skimmers read and store information encoded on the magnetic stripes of debit cards used at ATMs by legitimate bank customers. A typical part of the scheme is to mount a miniature camera on the ATM to capture customers entering their access codes. Another common part of the scheme is to manufacture counterfeit debit cards with the information they have gathered, documents say.
Investigators found 280 gift cards, blank credit cards and blank debit cards, as well as $139,000 divided into $5,000 stacks.
An inspection of one of the suspects’ cellphones uncovered photographs of Pena at a hotel organizing money into piles.
Investigators also say the phone contained videos of people taking money from ATMs and covering the ATM cameras with duct tape.
The phone also contained pictures of Western Union receipts of money that had been wired to Brazil.
Cortland Bank reported that the money illegally withdrawn from their ATM came from PNC accounts in Cincinnati.
The suspects’ most recent hearing was before federal Magistrate George Limbert on Dec. 22 in Youngstown.