Police: Men Stole Over $340,000 Using Fake Credit, ATM Cards
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Two men from Las Vegas and two men from California apparently wanted to make some big money in the Big Apple.
As 1010 WINS' Gene Michaels reported, police said they caught two of the men using fake credit and ATM cards to withdraw real cash from ATMs in the city – totaling more than $340,000.
Police: Men Stole Over $340,000 Using Fake Credit, ATM Cards
Security at the Chase Bank branch at 245 Seventh Ave. contacted police around 1:55 p.m. Thursday, after discovering that a man had withdrawn money from an account that had been flagged.
Bank security provided a photo of the suspect, and police found caught him in the act withdrawing money from the ATM. The man was arrested, and officers found nearly $5,000 in cash and 92 fake cards.
About two and a half hours later, police learned of a second suspect who had withdrawn money from a flagged account at the Atlantic Bank at 936 Third Ave. Police also caught the second suspect in the act, and found that he was carrying $16,000 and 82 fake cards as they arrested him.
"I don't know how they did it, but, how do you take a quarter million dollars," one man on the street said.
Police said the men had a machine that made the fraudulent cards. They found it, and two more suspects, in the Hotel Pennsylvania.
The men at the hotel, 401 Seventh Ave., were found with $37,000 in money orders and six fraudulent cards. A search of the suspects' hotel rooms turned up another $198,000 in money orders, $84,000 in cash, 200 fraudulent cards, and the credit card magnetic strip encoding device that had been used to create the fakes.
The suspects arrested were Garegin Spartalayan, 39, and Aram Maritrosian, 34, both of Las Vegas; Hayk Dzhandzhapanyan, 40, of Whittier, Calif.; and Davit Kudugulyan, 42, of North Hollywood, Calif.
The men were each charged with grand larceny, identity theft, and 380 counts of possession of a forged instrument, among other counts.
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