CLEVELAND, Ohio — Two men who hail from Cuba face federal charges that accuse them of using credit card skimmers to steal people’s identities.
The pair then used the information to make fraudulent credit cards and buy merchandise at Sam’s Clubs throughout Northeast Ohio, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Silvio Leon, 45, and Pablo Arrechavaleta, 41, were indicted this week on charges of conspiracy to commit credit card fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Federal prosecutors say Leon and Arrechavaleta, who both lived in Miami, were part of a group that installed credit card skimmers on gas station pumps in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado, Iowa and other places between May 2016 and June of this year. They used the stolen information to make counterfeit credit cards.
Many of the purchases the duo made were at Sam’s Cub stores in Cleveland, Mentor, Canton, Cuyahoga Falls and Oakwood Village, authorities claim.
They were arrested in June and were found with nearly 5,000 credit card accounts, according to a news release.
An affidavit written by FBI agent Paul Cruz wrote that a local investigation was spurred by a skimming device found at a BP gas station on Heisley Road in Mentor in February. The device had about 1,000 people’s names and credit card numbers on it.
Mentor police received calls from people complaining of fraudulent charges on their credit cards at Sam’s Club stores, and a detective determined that all of the victims had visited the same gas station, the affidavit states.
Sam’s Club employees looked through their records and found that someone had used a fake ID to obtain a member card and had used the stolen credit card information to make more than $120,000 in fraudulent purchases in 2017 and 2018, according to the affidavit. The same member card was used to make purchases in multiple states.
Agents reviewed surveillance images from some of the purchases and identified Leon and Arrechavaleta as the suspects, and later confirmed it with phone and travel records that they were at least near the stores when the purchases were made, according to court records.
North Olmsted police pulled the men over June 12. Officers found multiple credit cards, gift cards and electronic equipment, among other items, the affidavit states.
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