Stolen Target data used

Pair arrested with 96 fake cards; larger ring suspected

Associated Press

McAllen, Texas — Account infor­mation stolen during the Target securi­ty breach is now being divided up and sold off regionally, a South Texas police chief said Monday after the arrest of two Mexican citizens who authorities say arrived at the border with 96 fraud­ulent credit cards.

McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodri­guez said Mary Carmen Garcia, 27, and Daniel Guardiola Dominguez, 28, both of Monterrey, Mexico, used cards con­taining the account information of South Texas residents. Rodriguez said they were used to buy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise at na­tional retailers in the area including Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us.

“They’re obviously selling the data sets by region,” Rodriguez said.

Garcia and Guardiola were both be-ing held Monday on state fraud charg­es. It was not immediately known whether they had retained lawyers.

Rodriguez said he did not know whether they were the first arrests re­lated to the Target breach. Target did not immediately return phone and email messages left Monday, which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a fed­eral holiday. The Minneapolis-based company said last week that it has stop­ped more than a dozen operations that sought to scam breach victims by way of email, phone calls and text messages.

McAllen police began working with the U.S. Secret Service after a number of area retailers were hit with fraudu­lent purchases Jan. 12. The Secret Ser­vice confirmed that the fraudulent ac-counts traced back to the original Tar­get data breach from late last year, Ro­driguez said. Investigators fanned out to McAllen-area merchants and reviewed “miles of video” looking for the fraudsters, he said. From that, they were able to iden­tify two people and a car with Mexican license plates.

A message left for the Secret Service on Monday was not returned.

With the help of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, investiga­tors confirmed the identities of their suspects from immigration records of when they had entered Texas in the same vehicle. Police prepared arrest warrants last week and waited for them to return.

On Sunday morning, federal officials alerted police that their two suspects were at the Anzalduas International Bridge trying to re-enter the United States. They were carrying 96 fraudu­lent cards, Rodriguez said.

Investigators believe the two were involved in both the acquisition of the fraudulent account data and the pro­duction of the cards, but only part of what must have been a much broader conspiracy. Rodriguez said investiga­tors suspect Garcia and Guardiola were singling out Sundays for their shopping sprees hoping banks would not be as quick to detect the fraud.

With the amount of electronics and other merchandise purchased on Jan. 12, Rodriguez said the two would have needed an “army” to move it all.

Rodriguez also alluded to a link with Eastern Europe or Russia but did not provide additional details. He said he expected Garcia and Guardiola to even­tually face federal charges.

South Texas authorities have seen large-scale fraudulent credit card schemes before, including one in which they seized machines used to up­load information to the cards’ magnet­ic strips.

The Target breach is believed to have involved 40 million credit and debit card accounts and the personal infor­mation of 70 million customers.