Credit Card Scam Involving Court Employee Sees Indictment
Four people have seen themselves indicted after being accused of stealing debit and credit card numbers from unsuspecting credit card holders and subsequently using the collected information to buy gift cards worth hundreds of thousand dollars.
The accused are Timur Harris, Cassie St. Cyr, Crystal Lee and Diamond Alexander, Jr. All four pleaded not guilty to the accusation of six counts of bank fraud. According to federal prosecutors, the ring leaders of the group were Alexander and Lee, who is Alexander’s wife. These two were responsible for recruiting a number of people who were the ones who did the stealing of card numbers and purchasing of gift cards for them.
This indictment showed that Alexander and Lee used insiders to harvest large numbers of credit and debit card account numbers in exchange for a fee. One insider was an employee in a Seattle Municipal Court. Another was an employee of the Des Moines Jack in the Box restaurant.
According to federal agents, the Seattle Municipal Court employee worked in a customer service position which often had to deal with citizens who were paying fines from infractions that were traffic related. The employee was able to print out several account numbers by accessing the computer data of the court. These were given to Alexander and Lee in exchange for a fee, the employee confessed to detectives. This unnamed employee has been removed from the position and was not indicted.
Another insider was Timur Harris, a former employee of the Jack in the Box in Des Moines. She worked as a cashier in the drive-up window of this fast food restaurant. An in-store surveillance camera caught Harris in August of 2009 using a palm card reader to slide customer credit cards through hidden from view of customers. Harris admitted when interviewed by investigators that she was skimming the credit cards of customers using a device given to her by Alexander who she met as a customer several months earlier. Alexander gave her instructions to slide the credit cards of customers through the skimmer and give it back to him later, she said.
Alexander and Lee, investigators said, used the account numbers they harvested to “clone” illegitimate credit cards, transferring the stolen numbers on to the credit card’s magnetic strips. These cards held either their names or the name of Cassie St. Cyr, an accomplice. These cards were used to buy gift cards of large dominations from Wal-Mart stores in Bonney Lake and Everett.
The number of credit card holders affected by this scheme is still unknown. U.S. attorneys, however, say that Alexander, Lee and their accomplices used the stolen card numbers to charge and/or attempt to charge gift cards and other merchandise worth more than $300,000.
