NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A Romanian man pleaded guilty to a scheme to plant card reading devices on different ATMs at Navy Federal Credit Union locations.
Court documents say that 43-year-old Aurel Eremia and several other people he conspired with made an effort to install portable card reading device and micro camera equipment inside and over the mouth of NCFU card readers and keypads.
They used those skimming devices and camera equipment to record and acquire personal and financial information from the credit union's customers.
Once they stored and transferred that information, they used it to access customers' bank and credit accounts and re-encoded those account numbers onto magnetic strips of other cards including gift cards.
The re-encoded cards, in combination with the corresponding PINs, were used to make unauthorized withdrawals and transfers from the compromised NFCU accounts, in the Eastern District of Virginia and elsewhere.
The scheme resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.
The other conspirators have been convicted and sentenced.
Eremia pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. He faces a maximum of 30 years in prison on the conspiracy charge and a mandatory consecutive term of two years in prison on the aggravated identity theft charge.
Eremia's sentencing is set for March 4, 2021.
