Secret Service found two card-skimming devices on credit card machines in Southcentral Alaska during sweep this month

The U.S. Secret Service, state, and local law enforcement partners, conducted a payment card skimming and Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) fraud outreach operation Aug. 1-2 in several Alaskan cities.

The law enforcement team, which included the Secret Service, Anchorage Police Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Alaska, U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General, and the Alaska State Troopers, visited 165 businesses in Anchorage, Palmer, Wasilla, Kenai, Soldotna, and Seward.

They inspected ATMs, gas pumps and point-of-sale terminals for skimming devices and left educational materials for business owners and managers.

Two skimming devices were recovered during the operation. In total, more than 1,750 point-of-sale terminals, gas pumps and ATMs were inspected, the agency said.

“In the past few months, we’ve seen an increase in credit card skimming and EBT fraud in the greater Anchorage area,” said Glen Peterson, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Secret Service’s Seattle Field Office, whose area of responsibility includes Alaska. “Our goal is to locate and remove skimming devices before people’s credit card data can fall into the hands of criminals.”

This as the first time an outreach operation such as this has been conducted in Alaska by the U.S. Secret Service.

EBT information and other payment card numbers can be stolen when criminals install an illegal skimming device to the point-of-sale terminal in order to capture card information. They then encode the stolen data onto another card with a magnetic strip, such as a gift card or hotel key. It is estimated that skimming costs consumers and financial institutions more than $1 billion each year.

Law enforcement agencies have seen a nationwide increase in skimming over the past 18 months, particularly targeting EBT cards, which are sometimes known as “food stamps.” Each month, taxpayer money is deposited into government assistance accounts intended to help families pay for food and other basic items. This enables criminals who steal card information to time their fraudulent withdrawals and purchases around the state government’s monthly deposits, the agency said.

In 2020, a man with a Romanian passport was arrested for using credit card skimming devices in Alaska.

Marcus Rosu, an international criminal who lived in California, was sentenced in 2021 to 30 months in prison followed by five years of supervised release for bank fraud using a device to steal credit card information through skimming. He was required to pay $57,713.53 in restitution to his known victims. But he was released Aug. 26, 2022.

According to court documents, he became the subject of a federal investigation in February of 2020, when the United States Postal Inspection Service intercepted a package containing hundreds of fraudulent bank cards containing customers’ card information. The cards were backtracked to more than 70 banking institutions in southern California and some were traced to fraudulent transactions in Anchorage and the Mat-Su Valley. Through the course of the

investigation, Rosu was identified as the suspected mailer of the package.