Federal authorities in Pittsburgh have charged a Romanian national with installing skimmers at Dollar Bank ATMs across Ohio and Western Pennsylvania to steal bank data, victimizing some 700 customers of more than $450,000.
Ciprian Costel Borcea, who had been using a fake Italian passport in passing himself off as someone named Giovani Mancini, is in U.S. custody in Pittsburgh pending a detention hearing following an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service.
In an affidavit, Agent Bryton Peternel said the skimming operation was conducted from March 30 to May 5 in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere. Dollar Bank is based in Pittsburgh and has customers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Virginia.
Peternel, who worked with Dollar Bank investigators on the case, said Borcea and at least four other conspirators installed skimmers on ATMs that captured and stored data from the magnetic strip on debit cards. A hidden camera would capture the customer’s PIN. Later on, the conspirators retrieved the devices and cameras and transferred the data onto the magnetic strips of other cards.
Dollar Bank provided the Secret Service with video surveillance from ATMs of a “Suspect 1” — later determined to be Borcea — and others inserting the skimmers into the machines and placing a fabricated side panel containing a camera onto ATMs. The side panels looked like Dollar Bank ATMs so customers didn’t realize anything was amiss.
Video surveillance also showed the criminals returning to the ATMs to use the fraudulently created debit cards to make withdrawals from customer accounts. The bank provided a lineup of five suspects based on those images.
On May 5, the bank contacted the Secret Service to report surveillance that day of Suspect 1 putting a skimmer on an ATM in Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The same suspect put skimmers on ATMs in Brecksville, Ohio, and in Cleveland.
Cleveland Secret Service agents and local police arrested Suspect 1 that day when he returned to the Brecksville ATM where he’d placed a skimmer earlier.
The suspect gave authorities an Italian passport with the name Giovani Mancini printed on it. He also had a key fob for a Hyundai that was located nearby registered to an address in Kent, Ohio. A search of the car turned up clothing that matched the clothing worn by the skimming suspect along with an ATM skimmer, USB thumb drives and gift cards.
Agents brought in an Italian translator to question Suspect 1, but the translator told them their man wasn’t a native Italian speaker. He said the suspect was probably Romanian. Peternel said that large-scale ATM skimming fraudsters are often from Romania.
And so it turned out to be.
Fingerprints later determined that Mancini was really Ciprian Borcea of Romania.
He is charged with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft.
U.S. marshals transported him from Ohio to Pittsburgh last week. He was supposed to have a detention hearing on Wednesday, but it’s been pushed back to May 30. He remains locked up until then.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
