Hey Passengers, give it some thought the next time you decide to pay for that meal with plastic. Read it and see…
Wait staff at several Washington-area high-end restaurants stole credit
card numbers from customers and ran up a $750,000 tab at stores like
Gucci and Barney’s of New York, federal authorities said in court
documents.
Six servers have been implicated by the Secret Service in the operation
that comes as some investigators are concerned the recession will
stretch law enforcement budgets, providing credit card fraudsters with
the space they need to operate.
“Credit card crime is almost seen as a victimless crime,” said John
Cutler, president of the private financial fraud investigative firm Beau
Dietl and Associates, adding that insurance companies typically pay for
fraudulent charges.
“As police department budgets drop, it’s likely investigators will get
pulled away from credit fraud and put on more violent crimes.”
The customers victimized at the District’s M&S Grill, 701 Restaurant,
Clyde’s of Gallery Place and Bowie’s Carrabba’s Italian Restaurant, as
well as National Harbor’s main hotel and Gaylord National Hotel, are not
alone. Similar scams have cropped up nationwide.
In New Orleans, a waitress at Bubba Gump Shrimp Seafood Co. was charged
last week with selling up to 50 customers’ credit card information, The Times-Picayune reported. The waitress sold the numbers for $220 apiece
to two men who provided her with a machine used to scan the credit cards. In January, a Buffalo, N.Y., man was convicted of hiring several cashiers at local restaurants and a department store to steal customers’ credit card information, the Buffalo News reported.
Secret Service investigators cracked the Washington-area scheme after customers began complaining to their banks of unauthorized charges on
their cards, Secret Service Special Agent Philip Soto wrote in a sworn
statement filed in Alexandria’s federal court. Soto discovered patterns
in the charges that led him to the restaurants, where managers helped
him trace the stolen information back to specific servers.
“Every employee has a unique number they put into the register before
ringing up a charge,” Clyde’s of Gallery Place manager Paul Walker told
The Examiner. “With that system in place, we can point back to an
employee very quickly. … It’s very traceable.”
At the other restaurants, Soto wrote, similar systems were in place that
helped investigators trace the stolen information back to the six
waiters and waitresses. Management at M&S Grill and Gaylord said they
were cooperating with investigators and declined further comment. The
other restaurants declined to comment.
Three men who allegedly bought the numbers from the servers – Joseph
Artemus Bush, Aarron D. Gilbert and Erick V. Burton – used the information to create counterfeit credit cards that were used at area stores, Soto wrote. The men were caught on tape using the bogus cards to either buy items at stores like Target or gift cards at CVS Pharmacy
that they later spent at Barney’s and Gucci in Chevy Chase.
Secret Service spokesman Darrin Blackford declined to comment on the
investigation, but said he wasn’t aware of agents uncovering financial
fraud that was directly “attributable to the economy.”
Cutler, however, said, “We’re only beginning to see the economic pain of
the financial crisis. … The cutbacks are just starting now.”
“Municipalities will try not to cut back law enforcement, but there’s
only so much in the balloon,” he said. “At some point it will have to
pop.”