May 2, 2007

NEWS: FL Men Had 100+ Cards

Two Hispanic men were arrested in Bonita Springs, Florida, for a crime that’s notable even by extraordinary identity theft horror story standards. Armando Oliva Ravelo and Luis Alvarez Morejon were apprehended at a gas station, caught red-handed, as it were, with over one hundred stolen credit cards between the pair!

The peculiar story of Ravelo and Morejon can be seen as an educational tale, because of the distinctly unusual method of fraud which they were allegedly about to commit with the stolen cards. Thanks to a credit card reprogrammer, the cards’ magnetic strips had been reprogrammed with someone else’s information. Even the more learned identity theft experts find this particular method a bit of a baffler. The two told Lee County Sheriff’s Office deputies that they had bought the cards down in Miami for about five dollars each, and were in the process, by their own admission, of trying to discern whether each one was functional, or not.

That much was about what deputies had figured. They had tracked Ravelo and Morejon, who were in a Lincoln Navigator, from one gas station to another, until they found sufficient evidence wit which to pull them over. As of right now, it is unclear how many victims might have been affected by the crime.


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