A federal grand jury has indicted Gabriel Camara, 36, of Washington D.C., of one count of conspiring to commit bank fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft for his role in leading a card-skimming scheme that targeted customers of restaurants in the Washington, D.C.-metro area. If convicted, Camara faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison for conspiracy and two years for each of the aggravated identity theft counts.
According to the indictment, from January 2008 through May 2009, Camara paid servers at restaurants in the Washington, D.C.-metro area – including the Cheesecake Factory, PGA Tour Grill, and the Outback Steakhouse – to obtain credit card numbers of paying customers. He and a co-conspirator, Nicole Ward, provided the servers with skimmers that captured and stored credit card numbers. The servers and Ward delivered skimmers loaded with credit card numbers to Camara, who encoded the skimmed numbers onto various cards. He then gave the re-encoded cards to other co-conspirators, who used them to make purchases at wholesale club stores in Northern Virginia and elsewhere. Ward, 28, of Washington D.C., pled guilty on July 30, 2010, to conspiring to commit bank fraud and will be sentenced on Oct. 29, 2010.
Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Virginia