EXCERPT: As they drove over the Anzalduas International Bridge on Sunday morning, Mary Carmen Garcia and Daniel Dominguez could have passed for any of the thousands of Mexican tourists who visit the Rio Grande Valley each week.
But the Monterrey couple represented a different kind of tourism, authorities say. “We have reason to believe that these two individuals are part of a much larger fraud conspiracy,” investigator Rodriguez said.
The individual or individuals behind the Target hack have been selling the information in sections by region.
The couple in custody had been communicating with the overseas hackers, and using the card information they purchased, they made a series of bank cards with false names as well as empty gift cards, the chief said. They did this by overwriting the encoding in the magnetic strip with the information from the hacked accounts.
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Mexican criminals are highly organized and are on- the-road---fully equipped to loot, steal, and forge documents needed for their crimes. Read on.
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NJ BERGEN RECORD CIRCA 2004---Pelcastre brothers, Angel and Jorge, Dallas, Texas, were a walking threat to US national security, expert document forgers who, for a few thousand dollars, could give anyone a new identity (many "impoverished" latinos pay thousands of dollars to establish multiple identities in order to ride the US gravy train).
The Texas brothers were a "one-stop shop" for a myriad of fake US documents, including birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver's licenses----for any state in the US------ passports and resident alien cards, said NJ state police.
The Texas brothers turned a NJ hotel room into a business office and were readying a massive cache of fake Social Security cards for delivery to a local NJ identity broker. Officers happened upon two cars bearing Texas plates in a NJ hotel parking lot.
The Texas brothers were followed to a NJ office supply store nearby where they purchased computer supplies. Officers then followed the Texans to a NJ storage facility in Secaucus, NJ, where the Texans loaded several boxes into a car. One of them stood lookout. After a search, police recovered laminating sheets with built-in security features, pages of blank documents waiting for fake names and information, finished documents, computers and software to create the fake IDs.
All told, the haul was worth about $500,000 on the street when sold to "impoverished illegals." Police also recovered $6,000 in cash, which was the first payment from a NJ fake document broker for a shipment of 500 phony Social Security cards. ####