CHESAPEAKE, Va. — A Romanian national was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for using card skimmers to defraud banks and steal credit and debit card information across the East Coast.
Crisitian Romica Ristea, 52, installed and maintained portable card reading devices, also known as skimmers, and installed pin hole cameras to get customer's PIN numbers.
He did this from September 2022 through August 2023.
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Officers caught Ristea conducting an illegal transaction at a Bank of America in Chesapeake on Aug. 17, 2023. They arrested him and searched his vehicle.
They found 36 Vanilla Visa Cards, skimming tools, a skimming device and an international driver's license for the name of "Christan Weber," according to the Virginia Department of Justice.
Law enforcement searched Ristea's house where they found additional skimming tools and devices.
Ristea was estimated to have 91 vanilla gift cards encoded with stolen information, according to the Department of Justice.
The DOJ reports that 289 card numbers were compromised, according to a financial institution.
