14 DAY TRIAL // A 26-year-old man from Brooklyn, New York, admitted to instrumenting a credit card fraud operation that resulted in fraudulent charges totaling over $770,000.
Jonathan Oliveras, 26, pleaded guilty in the Eastern District Court of Virginia on Wednesday to one count of wire fraud and one of aggravated identity theft.
According to the indictment, Oliveras purchased so-called credit card dumps (the contents of the magnetic strips) from Russian hackers and wrote the data to blank cards using specialized equipment.
Stolen information corresponding to 2,341 credit cards was found in his possession at the time of his arrest. The cards had registered 4,400 fraudulent charges totaling $770,674.
The carder is believed to have resold credit card data to individuals in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., so it can be used in similar schemes.
Authorities also found 409 physical gift, debit and credit cards in Oliveras possession which had a combined value of $42,688.
The carder faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $1,541,349 for the wire fraud charge and two years and a $250,000 fine for the identity theft one. He is scheduled to be sentenced on October 28.
The case is the result of a joint investigation by the US Secret Service and the FBI and is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
In order to obtain credit card dumps fraudsters generally need to use skimmers placed either on ATMs or, as it has recently been the case, inside rogue card swipes in supermarkets.
A trend of sitting on the stolen data for months before abusing it has also been observed in the past couple of years. This makes it harder to determine the point of compromise and suspend all cards used there over a period of time.