A Cuban national who was among several people using stolen credit card information to buy hundreds of gift cards was sentenced Monday to more than five years in federal prison.
Gift cards were bought using credit card information gleaned from illegal skimmers affixed to gas pumps across the state.
Investigators say the Miami-based group of Cuban nationals pilfered credit card information from Lansing to Grand Rapids over a span of about three months last summer.
Juan Ledesma, 23, is one of five people nabbed in Kent County. U.S. District Court Judge Janet T. Neff on Monday sentenced him to 63 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine. In exchange for his plea, two other criminal charges were dismissed, including aggravated identity theft.
Ledesma and his confederates are on the hook for nearly $51,000 in restitution. Two co-defendants were each sentenced to a year in federal prison, cases against two others are pending.
Police in Kent and Eaton counties seized 428 store value cards linked to the scam.
Gas stations across Michigan last summer began to discover that their pumps had been broken into and electronic skimmers installed to digitally record credit card information from people paying at the pump.
“Customers had no way of knowing that their account data had been recorded when they used their cards,’’ FBI agent Christopher J. Rodolico wrote in a criminal complaint filed in late October.
Within days of using their credit cards, customers reported seeing unauthorized charges popping up on their statements. In most cases, their credit card information was used to buy store-value, or gift cards, at self-checkout lanes at Meijer and Walmart, court records show.
Investigators saw a common thread: the victims had all used credit cards at the same pumps at the same gas stations shortly before the store cards were purchased.
Store cards were used to buy “high-ticket’’ items at self-serve checkout lanes during buying trips to ‘big box’ retail stores such as Meijer, Rodolico wrote in the criminal complaint.
Grand Rapids police last summer issued a bulletin alerting officers to the scam involving out-of-staters, possibly Cuban nationals, installing skimming devices at area gas pumps. That led to a tip about a group of Cuban nationals staying at a pair of Grandville hotels and traveling in rental cars.
Grand Rapids police identified a group staying at a Comfort Inn in Grandville. A search of vehicles and two hotel rooms turned up a cache of store value cards and three keys to gas pumps.
Police arrested Ledesma as he walked out of the hotel room; he was carrying two gas pump keys at the time.
A search of Ledesma’s hotel room turned up another cache of store cards, a thumb drive and a skimmer tool similar to what was recovered from numerous compromised gas pumps, court records show.
The skimmer and cards were hidden in a hotel tissue box, court records show. Ledesma at the time was wanted by police in Colorado for fraud and identity theft.
Comfort Inn employees the following day notified police after finding a stack of 30 store value cards hidden in a sofa.
Police returned to the hotel on Oct. 28 and made three more arrests. Officers found another cache of store value cards shoved down in between the wall and the floor molding along with $3,200 in $100 bills that had been hidden in a jar of protein powder found in one of the suspect’s luggage.
