It seemed like a simple arrest: A Salinas woman, nabbed using a
fake credit card at a Morgan Hill sewing shop.
Gilroy – It seemed like a simple arrest: A Salinas woman, nabbed using a fake credit card at a Morgan Hill sewing shop.
But the heap of receipts in Theresa Bautista’s purse unraveled a bigger, more bizarre crime – a fraud ring that victimized the customers of a Gilroy dry cleaner, including 10 police officers and Sheriff’s deputies from San Jose to Hollister.
At least 17 people were scammed by a network of thieves who harvested credit card receipts from the cleaner, likely by combing the numbers from the trash, said Gilroy Police Detective Frank Bozzo, who is investigating the case. He’s still tallying the losses, which are “in the thousands,” he said.
“And these are just the frauds we know about,” he said.
Reports of credit-card fraud had been streaming across Bozzo’s desk since July 10. The scam had found unlikely victims: Sheriff’s deputies and police officers from San Jose, Gilroy and the Hollister-Gilroy office of the California Highway Patrol, as well as civilians. All of them still had their credit cards. As Bozzo sifted through the reports, he honed in on the common thread that linked the victims.
“You start asking, ‘OK, where would all these people be using their credit cards?’ ” Bozzo explained. “The most common place for us would be a cleaner’s. We use them all the time,” to launder uniforms.
Receipts with stolen
numbers found
As Bozzo pieced together Gilroy complaints, Morgan Hill police were fielding calls from a fraud victim, who cited $45 in false charges made to her account at Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts’ Tennant Avenue store by Theresa Bautista of Salinas, who presented a pre-paid Visa cash card with her victim’s number embossed on the back, said Bozzo. At the register, she told the clerk the magnetic strip wasn’t working, and asked her to type in the number manually. She did, and the charges landed on the victim’s account.
When Bautista returned to that store Aug. 7, a clerk recognized her and called police, who arrested the 51-year-old woman on charges of burglary, fraudulently acquiring access cards, identity theft, possession of stolen property and a parole violation, said Morgan Hill Police Commander David Swing.
In her purse they found 15 receipts from the Gilroy cleaner – a wealth of fraud-ready information, including unredacted credit card numbers and expiration dates. Bautista also had a scrap of paper on which four additional numbers and expiration dates were scribbled, said Swing, and a card falsely stamped with a Gilroy police officer’s credit card number.
Police: Ringleader had
“long history of fraud”
The crime looked familiar. Four days earlier, Sheriff’s deputies had arrested Rachelle Wario, a 34-year-old Gilroy woman with “a long history of fraud,” Bozzo said, who had recently posted bail and skipped a sentencing hearing on similar charges, according to Sheriff’s investigators.
Wario had stopped paying rent on a Windmill Mini-Storage shed, then tried to pay over the phone with two stolen credit cards, both of which were refused. (Both were already closed after Wario charged other items to them.) One of her victims, a Sheriff’s deputy, called the storage company to ask who was using the card. When Wario turned up at Windmill Mini-Storage in person, presenting yet another fake card, deputies searched her, her car, and her storage unit, uncovering stolen goods, embossing equipment, and crystal methamphetamine stashed in her bra.
“She was caught red-handed,” said Sheriff’s Detective Dennis Moser.
Wario was booked on a dizzying list of charges from forgery to possession of a controlled substance, including four counts of possession of stolen property.
Bozzo believes Wario was the “centerpoint” who supplied Bautista and others with pilfered receipts, and taught them to produce fake cards using the embossing equipment – likely for a fee, he said. One probable client is Lisa Chantel Ybarra, a 38-year-old Morgan Hill woman arrested last Wednesday by Gilroy police in connection with the case. The man arrested alongside Ybarra, 24-year-old Jorge Luis Hernandez of Morgan Hill, was charged with possession of a controlled substance.
Thus far, Wario, Ybarra and Hernandez are the only three people arrested in connection with the fraud, but as Bozzo sifts through evidence, he expects to track down more. It is unclear at this point in the investigation how the three are acquainted, if at all.
Dry cleaner negligent,
but not involved
Bozzo declined to identify the Gilroy dry cleaner involved, but said the shop had been cooperative, and did not apparently collude with Wario in the fraud. The cleaner’s only error, he said, was failing to keep customers’ data safe.
Federal law requires businesses to shorten credit card numbers printed on customer receipts, but only if the receipts are printed electronically. Old-fashioned imprint receipts aren’t subject to the same protections, and are printed with a customer’s complete card number intact.
“A lot of businesses aren’t aware of the law,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, based in San Diego. “And if a machine isn’t capable of providing a truncated receipt, the law doesn’t apply. In that case, you have to shred it.”
Bozzo, who was interviewed Thursday, was not available Friday to clarify whether the store printed receipts electronically. Regardless of how receipts are printed, businesses are obliged to protect customer information and safely dispose of it, Stephens said.
The other problem lies with businesses that accept fake cards, said Bozzo.
“Merchants sometimes get so busy, they’re running a lot of customers, and they’re not paying as close attention as they could,” he said. “Still, you’ve got to know: A cash card doesn’t have a piece of tape with some numbers on the back of it.”
