KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A 23-year-old man is facing charges of installing skimming devices at bank ATMs inside several metro QuikTrip stores.
According to charging documents filed Tuesday in federal court, David Velcu is alleged to have put ATM skimmers – devices that read credit card information – on the card readers of UMB Bank ATMs inside QuikTrips located in Olathe, Kansas City, Kansas, and Riverside.
Federal investigators were tipped off after a store manager in Olathe found a metal piece with a magnetic strip reader lodged in the card reader slot and a small plastic camera placed over the ATM keypad to record users' PIN numbers. The manager notified UMB Bank and law enforcement.
Surveillance video captured Velcu’s car, which investigators tracked back to a person in California.
Using a vehicle database, investigators looked up the car’s VIN and found out it had been used for an oil change in March on 40 Highway in Kansas City.
Working on a hunch, an Olathe detective patrolled the parking lots of nearby motels and located the car a mile away.
"It's just good police work," Olathe Police Sgt. Logan Bonney said of Detective Brian Peters and the rest of the investigators' actions.
Police pulled the car over and located Velcu, a juvenile, and a woman later identified as Velcu’s wife who was holding the couple’s infant son.
When police searched the car, they located three re-encoded magnetic strip cards, codes, tubes of super glue and small crowbars.
A search of the hotel room used by Velcu and others in the operation revealed additional equipment used to make ATM skimming devices.
Velcu was later identified as being from Romania; he illegally came to the United States via Mexico in 2017.
According to a QuikTrip spokesman, it is their policy to check ATMs in stores daily for any issues. The stores also have alerts on all pumps that go off if someone tries to tamper with the card reader.
