Five men were arrested in Los Angeles because he suspected to use fake electronic performance transmission cards to offer fraudulent means to support families with low incomes.
All five men are in the USA without permission and, according to the US Ministry of Justice, are obsessed with more than 160 fake EBT cards together at the time of their arrests. The men are Marcel Musat, 53, from Romania; Ionut Calciu, 31, from Romania; Florian Serban, 51, from Romania; Wesley David Adrian Dimoua-Moua, 36, from France; and Hichem Mohamed El Mabrouk, 35, from France.
“These accused, who are illegal in the United States, have attacked and stolen some of the poorest members of our community,” we worked. Joseph T. McNally said in a statement. “This fraudulent activity has contributed to considerable financial losses and undermined a significant lifeline for fighting families.”
The men are accused of creating cloned cards that are debit cards, gift cards or other devices with magnetic stripes that were encoded with information from legitimate EBT cards. Some of the men were also owned by skimming devices that are installed on ATMs to record card data and PIN entries from the card holders, the prosecutors claim.
They are accused of receiving up to 25,480 US dollars from fraudulent advantages of Calfresh and Calworks, and are calculated with a number of use of non -authorized access devices or fake EBT cards.
EBT fraud is a widespread problem in California. The amount that is accused of men is only a decline in the bucket of the total amount that is missing every year.
According to court documents, the California Ministry of Social Services discovered more than 126.8 million dollars from the victims' cards in 2024. In Los Angeles County, officials say that more than 19.6 million dollars in 2022 were stolen on EBT services.
The men were caught on Sunday by a coordinated law enforcement authorities, where more than 70 civil servants monitored the ATM locations in the entire area of Los Angeles in order to identify people who make payments with information from stolen EBT cards.
“This successful operation aimed at transnational criminal organizations that stole from our less happy neighbors and taxpayers,” said John Pasciucco, a special representative at Los Angeles in Homeland Security. “HSI Los Angeles and our partners will work day and night to ensure that this help is still available to those who need the most urgent, and not in the pockets of greedy criminals.”
In 2023, the police authority arrested 13 Romanian citizens in Los Angeles, which were assumed that they are a Romanian syndicate that is known that they address people with economic difficulties for their EBT cards. Calciu, one of the men arrested in the bust on Sunday, was previously convicted of severe robbery in Romania, the prosecutors said.