CENTERVILLE — A Wal-Mart gift card. A gift card from a Mexican restaurant. A hotel room key card.

What Centerville police say these items recently seized from a hotel room have in common is that rather than being able to buy only food or get into a room, the magnetic strips on all of the cards were re-encoded with someone else's credit or debit card number and could be used just like a regular credit card.

It's just the latest example of what law enforcers statewide say is a continuously growing problem: skimming.

"Especially this last year. We’re seeing people come from out of state and doing this," said Centerville Police Lt. Von Steenblik.

During an investigation in March, two men were observed by store security at Wal-Mart in Centerville, 221 W. Parrish Lane, making "suspicious credit card transactions," according to a search warrant unsealed in 2nd District Court.

"(Loss Prevention) advised that the males purchased gift cards with multiple credit cards, which she believes were cloned. The LP have been involved with several investigations involving traveling groups using cloned credit cards and from her experience believed that is what the two suspects … were doing. LP had also been alerted by at least two other Wal-Mart stores about these same two individuals doing the same thing at their stores," the warrant states.

Police were called and searched both the men and their hotel room. Investigators found more than 40 gift cards, a machine that re-encodes magnetic strips and an Xbox that detectives believe was being used like a computer to access the internet, according to the warrant. Sixteen of those cards "were found to have been re-encoded with a different financial transaction card account number."

Because this type of crime has become more frequent, Steenblik said Centerville police had been working with Wal-Mart security closely, teaching them how to identify potential card skimmers and then document their transactions using store security cameras.

"How many people go in and buy 25 gift cards at a time? You just don’t. That’s the give-away,” he said. "And they just keep buying them until they get declined and then they move on to the next credit card number."

Steenblik said there are groups that travel around the country to either steal credit card information or use the information they've already illegally obtained.

"A lot of them that we were seeing that have come through over the last six to nine months through Centerville are Cubans, and they’re coming out of the Miami area,” he said.

Over the weekend, Cottonwood Heights police arrested two men from Florida who were caught allegedly installing a card skimming machine in a gas pump.

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Jail release of 2 in card skimming bust angers police

Two Florida men accused of installing a card skimming device at a gas pump were arrested thanks to an alert police officer. But the men were released from the Salt Lake County Jail five hours later due to overcrowding issues, and now police don't believe they'll ever find them again.

That arrest comes on the heels of the arrests of two teen boys from Romania by the Utah Highway Patrol earlier this year on I-70 near Richfield. According to a search warrant affidavit filed in the case, the teens were allegedly "traveling cross-country in order to skim credit card and personal information using the skimmers, laptop, cellphone and electronic storage devices found in their possession."

Similar incidents are being reported around the country.

• Two men from Italy and Romania were indicted Tuesday on charges they ran an elaborate, large-scale, credit-card skimming ring in several Middlesex, Massachusetts, towns along the Route 128 corridor, according to the Bedford Patch.

• The Louisana secretary of agriculture reported on March 30 that 15 credit card skimming devices were found at gasoline pumps in different parts of the state over the past month, collecting about 4,000 credit and debit card numbers.

• The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department reported in March that at least 80 people had their bank card information compromised by a card skimming device at a gas pump in the tourist town of Big Bear, California, according to ABC 7.

Steenblik said a person's credit card information is obtained by one of two ways. One is buying a number off the "dark web." Those numbers, he said, are collected during high-profile security breaches such as what happened with Target and Arby's. The other way is by installing card skimming machines, such as at gas pumps or ATMs.

A person then buys a re-encoding machine, which can be purchased off the regular internet, Steenblik said, and puts the stolen number on anything that has a magnetic strip.

"It can be a gift card, it can be any card that has a magnetic strip,” he said.

A room key card can then be used, essentially, as a credit card.

Most victims don't realize they've been victimized until after the fact because their credit card is still in their wallets. They have no idea the information from it has been stolen.

Steenblik said the scammers will then typically go to big box stores and purchase either gift cards or iPads and phones. Gift cards can be spent, re-encoded or pawned off, he said, which is why they are so popular. Plus, they're small and easier to steal and conceal, Steenblik said.

Skimming is part of a "really big operation" that is similar to organized crime, he said. The ones that are caught in Utah are typically at the bottom of their group.

"They drive in or fly in, get a rental car, and go up and down the I-15 corridor doing this,” he said.

But when they're caught, Steenblik said they rarely talk. And those who do talk to investigators only know the person who hired them by their first name, and the only contact they have with them is through a phone that has since been discarded.

Once they bail out of jail, they typically flee.

"Some of them get bail posted for them, and then they’re gone. We see very few of them come back to court,” Steenblik said.

Investigators believe the "bigger fish" in the operation aren't actually in Utah, which is why local police agencies rely on assistance from the U.S. Secret Service to help with the cases.

U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber said Wednesday that his office has seen skimming scams for years.

"Cyber is the new frontier of crime. This is the manifestation of that. This is a cybercrime. They’re using technology to rip people off,” he said.

Steenblik said the best thing local law enforcers can do for now is to train stores on how to recognize skimming.

Contributing: Dennis Romboy

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