A Brooklyn man has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for masterminding a credit card-fraud operation that stretched from the East Coast of the United States to Russia and resulted in more than $700,000 in fraudulent charges, the Department of Justice announced.
Jonathan Oliveras, 26, was sentenced by U.S. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. Oliveras was ordered to forfeit $770,646 and to serve three years of supervised release. Oliveras pleaded guilty in August to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as Main Justice reported. He could have been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
When federal and local law enforcement officers searched Oliveras’s apartment in July 2010, they found damning evidence, including credit card encoding equipment and more than 2,300 stolen credit card numbers, the DOJ said. Several thousand fraudulent charges have been linked to his operation, the DOJ said.
Oliveras managed a ring that used stolen credit card account information in New York, New Jersey and the Washington, D.C., area, the DOJ said. Oliveras sent payments to individuals he believed to be in Russia for the stolen account information, then distributed the stolen account information, which was re-encoded onto plastic cards and used to buy gift cards, investigators said. The gift cards were used to buy items that were returned for cash.
Offices of the FBI and Secret Service in New York, Washington and New Jersey investigated.
