Thanks to a citizen’s keen eye and instinct, she alerted Bothell police officers who tracked down and arrested a pair of men suspected of “skimming” credit cards at Canyon Park-area Chase Bank and Bank of America ATMs about a year ago.
Last Friday, one of the men, Romanian national Dan Petri, 35, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Seattle to five years in prison, five years of supervised release and $247,783 in restitution for bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to court documents. Petri lived in Kirkland at the time of his arrest.
Bothell Police Department Capt. Denise Langford noted that this is a “great case,” in the sense that the woman paid attention to what was happening and contacted police. “It really paid off,” Langford added.
According to Langford, the woman called 9-1-1 at about 2 p.m. Dec. 2, 2010, shortly after she spotted two men loitering at the Chase ATM and withdrawing a large amount of cash. She went inside the bank to do her banking because she was suspicious of the men and worried they were tampering with the ATM, the captain said.
After she returned to her car, the men’s vehicle was situated in front of hers and she took down the license-plate number and made her phone call. Police soon arrived on the scene and apprehended one man in the vehicle at one bank and the other man on foot at another bank. Several officers teamed up on the arrests, said Langford, who noted they were charged with identity theft and the case was handed over to the U.S. Federal Attorney’s Office.
Both men were also charged with possession of counterfeit or unauthorized access devices and were jailed at the SeaTac Federal Detention Center.
On Nov. 18, Petri was said to belong to an “international multi-million-dollar crime ring” targeting Americans and the American banking system, said judge Robert S. Lasnik while imposing the sentence.
Along with his alleged accomplice, Ion Armeanca — 44 at the time of his Bothell arrest — and others, Petri raided bank accounts by installing high-tech devices on a handful of King County-area ATMs to capture customer account numbers and PINs, read the court documents. Petri and his accomplice are linked to fraudulent withdrawals from more than 300 victims, and the loss amount attributed to the ring is more than $276,838.
According to court documents, some of the money was wired back to family and associates in Romania, and some of the account numbers and personal information was sent from associates in Europe to the men in Seattle so they could raid the European accounts at ATMs here.
Judge Lasnik added that Petri had traveled to Canada posing as a musician, and was then able to sneak across the border into New York. Petri “came here through fraud to defraud,” prosecutors told the judge. Petri will likely be deported following his prison sentence.
In Bothell, Langford noted that police deal with a variety of identity-theft and fraud cases each year.
“These ID-theft crimes in general are incredibly difficult for people, even if they lose no money… It is an incredible hassle in terms of time and hassle and energy to straighten out your accounts,” Lasnik added.
The U.S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force investigated the case, which was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven Masada.
In a previous court hearing, a Secret Service agent said that ATM skimmers place a fake faceplate over a cash machine’s card reader, according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story. A skimming device is then placed inside the fake plate, where it can capture the information stored in the card’s magnetic strip. To complete the theft, identity thieves place small cameras above the ATM keypad to capture customers’ PIN numbers. Thieves then “re-code” victims’ bank data onto blank debit cards or store gift cards.
