Fraudster foot soldiers nabbed

Three Florida men were arraigned following their arrest Feb. 9, 2009, for an alleged spending spree using fraudulent credit card numbers tied to the Heartland Payment Systems Inc. data breach. Heartland disclosed the breach in January 2009 shortly after Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide informed the company of suspicious activity associated with transactions it processed.

The suspects, Timothy Johns, 21, Tony Acreus, 20, and Jeremy Frazier, 20, were arrested by Leon County, Fla., police officers at a nearby Wal-Mart Stores Inc. location, where they had repeatedly made fraudulent purchases using Visa gift cards. The purchases were in excess of $100,000, according to the Leon County Sheriff's Department.

"They were perpetrating this scam, and they basically perpetrated it too many times," said Leon County Sgt. Tony Drzewiecki.

According to Drzewiecki, the suspects encoded Visa gift cards using stolen credit card numbers and then used the cards to buy merchandise at various Florida Wal-Mart stores. He said police had investigated the case for several months in conjunction with Wal-Mart's "loss prevention" division.

Threads in a web

Drzewiecki added that the suspects' precise role in the Heartland data breach is under investigation and that it wasn't yet determined how they obtained the stolen data. However, he said authorities suspect the Heartland matter – which is under investigation by federal law enforcement – is wide-ranging.

"It's safe to say it's a complex web of associates involved," he said. "From an investigative standpoint, we're going follow this to the source of how the theft on the numbers occurred and how these numbers were sold."

Heartland, the nation's sixth largest payment processor, stated that hackers had gained access to millions of credit and debit card numbers from its network over the course of several months in 2008. Over 500 financial institutions have since disclosed that their customers' credit or debit cards were compromised in connection with the breach.

According to Heartland, no confidential merchant data, Social Security numbers, unencrypted PINs, addresses or telephone numbers were stolen.

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