TRENTON – Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman announced that 12 New York residents were indicted yesterday for allegedly using 52 stolen credit cards in five Atlantic City casinos to perpetrate a cash advance scheme that stole $293,600 from banks that guaranteed the transactions.
The Division of Criminal Justice obtained the indictment from the Atlantic County grand jury, which charged each of the 12 New Yorkers with second-degree conspiracy, second-degree identity theft, second-degree theft by deception and third-degree fraudulent use of a credit card.
The indictment alleges that over the course several days in May 2011, 10 of the defendants entered the casinos and conducted the cash withdrawals at the Showboat, Tropicana, Caesars, Harrah’s and Bally’s casinos. When they allegedly conducted the transactions, they presented their legitimate identification but used the fraudulent credit cards; those credit cards were embossed with their name, but the magnetic strip embedded on the card belonged to a credit card in another’s name. Because the name embossed on the card matched the legitimate identification provided by the suspects, and the credit card numbers on the magnetic strip on the card were valid numbers, the suspects were able to obtain the cash advances.
The Division of Criminal Justice is alleging that those 10 defendants were acting at the direction of Lena Guralnik, 41, of Bronx, N.Y., and Intiaz Khan, 33, of New Windsor, N.Y., who led the ring by transporting the group to Atlantic City, providing them with the stolen credit cards and supervising the transactions. Guralnik and Khan also allegedly kept the bulk of the stolen cash.
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