Four Men Busted for Stealing Hundreds of Thousands From Bank Accounts Using Fake Credit Cards

Lots of lessons here. Protect your bank account numbers and passwords. Its less likely that an individual will steal your funds than the government but you still need to be careful.

Also note the advancement in private surveillance, the bank was able to detect the fradulent withdrawal of funds in real time, grab a picture of the suspects and get it it the police in apparently minutes.

NyPo has the details:

Four men from Los Angeles and Las Vegas were busted for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manhattan bank accounts using fraudulent debit and credit cards, police said.

Chase Bank employees alerted the NYPD shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday that a man was at an ATM withdrawing cash from a flagged account at their Chelsea branch on Seventh Avenue near 24th Street and sent a picture of him to the cops.

Officers from the Manhattan South Grand Larceny Task Force arrested the suspect and recovered 92 phony debit and credit cards as well as $5,000 in cash.

Later that afternoon, the officers were tipped that another man was withdrawing money from a flagged account in an Atlantic Bank branch on Third Avenue near 58th Street, authorities said.

When they took him into police custody, they found $16,000 in cash on him, as well as 82 cards, cops said.

Two other accomplices were arrested in Midtown at Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, police said.

Cops carried out a search warrant of their hotel rooms and recovered $198,000 in money orders as well as $84,000 in cash and 200 phony cards. A magnetic strip encoding device was also found by the police.

Suspects Garegin Spartalyan, 39, and Aram Martirosian, 34, hailed from Las Vegas, cops said. Hayk Dzhandzhapanyan, 40, is from Whittier, California, and Davit Kudugulyan, 42, lives in North Hollywood, California.

They were all charged with 380 counts of criminal possession of a forged instrument, as well as one count each of grand larceny and identity theft, among other charges.