WHAT HEELS: Cheesecake Factory Servers’ Felonious Card-Skimming
Nicole Ward, 28, plead guilty conspiring to commit bank fraud for her role in a card-skimming scheme that targeted patrons of The Cheesecake Factory in Washington, D.C. According to prosecutors, Ward recruited two servers and offered them a bounty for each credit card number they captured with skimming devices she provided to them.
By March 2009 the three of them had collected nearly 90 credit card numbers, which Ward turned over to (alleged) co-conspirator Gabriel Camara, who encoded the numbers onto fake cards that were used to buy more than $117,000 worth of merchandise in VA, The Washington Post reports:
Federal officials became aware of the scheme in April of last year, when Citibank investigators reported numerous fraudulent charges on cards that had been used at the Cheesecake Factory at 5345 Wisconsin Ave. in Friendship Heights, just south of the Maryland line. Because servers at the restaurant have to swipe a server card unique to them before processing a credit card, investigators were able to narrow the transactions to three servers, according to court documents.
Ward faces up to 30 years in prison when she is sentenced on October 29th, reports Legal Times. The two servers who helped her skim the cards avoided prosecution by co-operating with the authorities.
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