Police bust major credit card fraud operation

ATLANTA — Atlanta police have broken up a major credit card fraud operation totaling more than half a million dollars.

Channel 2’s Craig Lucie got details about how investigators found nearly 400 fake credit cards inside an apartment along with multiple card-making machines.

“Based on their criminal histories, they've been doing this for years,” said credit card fraud investigator Kenneth Stapler.

Detective Stapler says when he and the first responding Atlanta police officer walked inside Shaunice Graham and Marvin Cato's southeast Atlanta apartment, they knew they had just discovered a major fraudulent credit card operation.

"He noticed credit cards laying all over the place. They were on the floor, the bed, the coffee table, the computer table," said Stapler.
 
Police took pictures showing fake credit cards and encoding devices they found all over the apartment.
 
"I think I counted about 366 fraudulent credit cards, all forgeries, that they probably made right there in the apartment," said Stapler.
 
The cards all had different numbers.
 
"We found out that these numbers were issued from banks all over the world. It appears that they were getting these stolen credit card numbers from a website then downloading them and encoding the credit cards with the numbers," said Stapler.
 
According to the police report, detectives say the couple would go to Best Buy and buy computers with the fake credit cards then come back, return the computers for Best Buy gift cards which they found all over the apartment.

"We recovered $33,000 of computers out of the apartment that day," said Stapler.
 
Detective Stapler thinks Graham and Cato were selling the computers overseas.

Typically if you pay $1,000 for a computer here, in some countries overseas you can triple your money.

Police say they committed fraud using aliases at multiple U.S. banks, banks in Germany, Denmark and the Bank of China.

The U.S. Secret Service is now involved, and they are currently doing forensic checks on their computers to find out just how big this operation really is.

Cox Media Group