A 27-year-old man whom authorities say is part of a Romanian organized crime ring responsible for skimming and cloning credit cards throughout south Louisiana is facing a count of skimming in Baton Rouge.
Costinel Matei was one of six people arrested on Dec. 28 by the U.S. Secret Service in a Memphis hotel room as part of an investigation by a task force that included the federal agency and sheriff’s offices in East Baton Rouge and St. John parishes. Authorities discovered marijuana, IDs that looked fake, a lamination machine and $4,580 in cash, according to news reports.
A week earlier, on Dec. 21, two other members of the ring were arrested in Gonzales at a gas station and found with $4,664 in cash and dozens of gift cards encoded with bank account information. Two suspects at that Gonzales station fled on foot before Gonzales Police arrived but were discovered on Dec. 28 in the Memphis hotel room.
Gonzales police on Thursday arrested a man and a woman from Romania accused of skimming credit cards, according to police spokeswoman Charlott…
Matei was transferred to East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Saturday and booked on a count of violating Louisiana’s anti-skimming law, a felony.
All eight suspects in custody in Baton Rouge, Gonzales and Memphis are from Romania, and most of them are here illegally and with counterfeit documents, said Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office.
Hicks said that her agency also has warrants out for the five suspects still in custody in Memphis.
East Baton Rouge Parish was able to connect Matei after his Memphis arrest to surveillance footage of a man who placed a skimming device at an ATM machine at Neighbor’s Federal Credit Union on Perkins Road, according to Matei’s arrest warrant. The credit union was the last ATM used by a Baton Rouge man who reported $1,400 worth of unauthorized withdrawals in Baton Rouge, Harvey, Gonzales and Lafayette, according to the warrant.
During December, there were 290 “known fraudulent transactions” in the capitol region. The Sheriff’s Office is still adding up the losses, but reports that Neighbors is out at least $100,000 and an unnamed credit union in LaPlace is missing at least $35,000.