The Orange County Sheriff's Office has arrested 13 of 14 suspects they say used skimming devices, stolen trucks and gift cards to defraud both individuals and businesses in Central Florida to the tune of over $2 million.
Corporal Rob Bell said the ringleader and owner of A&A Trucking on Patch Road, Omilquer Garcia Perez, remains at large.
Investigators said Perez led a three pronged operation that involved stealing heavy duty trucks, retrofitting them with large fuel tanks and using them to buy diesel from retailers around Florida. The truck drivers would purchase gift cards that were encoded with data from legitimate credit card accounts. Information from those 32,000 accounts were obtained through skimmers placed at gas pumps around Central Florida.
"They didn't even get out of their car. They'd use a small tool. They would open up the face of it (the pump) if it wasn't secure, and place that skimmer inside in less than a minute," Bell explained.
They would return later to retrieve the skimmer with the credit card information of all who used those pumps.
This was an organized effort to find the suspects -- with the help of the Secret Service, the state Department of Environmental Protection -- the sheriff's office Organized Crime Unit spent 18 months getting to the bottom of the alleged crime spree.
Charges range from credit card fraud to racketeering.
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