TAYLORSVILLE, Utah — Hundreds of people were impacted by a scam involving ATMs and card skimmers, according to Taylorsville Police.
"It’s one of the biggest ones that we've handled since we've been a police department since 2021,” said Lt. Aaron Cheshire.
Police said the fraud that has impacted over 900 people, stemmed mostly from ATMs at 7-Eleven convenience stores.
“Our fraud investigators noticed kind of an uptick in some of our members reporting ATM fraud,” said Amanda Morton, the vice president of relationship development at Cyprus Credit Union. “That triggered them to do a little bit of investigative work where they started pulling ATM footage and uncovered that it was the same male."
On Dec. 5, they notified police that something was going on.
"The detective along with some other detectives in that unit began investigating the case and found that the suspects in this case were using scamming type devices that they were putting on ATM machines,” said Cheshire.
Police arrested the 17-year-old suspect and his parents, Florin Turtulea and Irina Donica. They found skimming devices and SD cards with financial transactions at their home. Police said they also found thousands of dollars of stolen items and over $40,000 in cash there too.
Investigators learned there were “eight specific incidents” where the family “used the stolen skimmed financial transaction card information to withdraw money from ATM’s [sic] in the Salt lake Valley [sic], which totaled $2,300.00,” according to police documents.
"These devices that they put on the ATM machines would record the data, all of the person's personal information data from their card, and they were able to actually clone that card onto like a gift card or something like that, and then go and use that gift card to take out money or buy things, or anything like that,” explained Cheshire.
To help prevent someone from getting your card details, there are some steps you can take.
"Anywhere that you’re going to insert your card manually, you want to do quick assessment before you do that,” said Morton. "Notice if something looks off — is there something that appears to be extra placed? Is there something that’s a different color of plastic than the rest of the ATM?”
"It’s important that you check the charges on your credit and debit cards regularly and make sure that there are no fraudulent charges on there,” added Cheshire.
