An alleged identity thief was charged last Wednesday with looting more than $200,000 from customer accounts at a Rancho Peñasquitos bank by using an electronic device to steal debit card information. The suspect, Daniel Axinte, 49, is suspected of stealing from about 950 customers at the Chase Bank branch on Black Mountain Road, but authorities said that number may go up if more victims come forward.
Axinte was arraigned before San Diego Superior Court Judge David Szumowski on 45 counts of identity theft, grand theft, burglary, making fake ID cards and a special allegation that losses exceeded $200,000, prosecutor Sharla Evert said.
“I was just out walking in the park. I’m not guilty,” Axinte blurted out in court.
His bail was set at $1 million.
Evert said charges related to about 900 more victims would be added against Axinte, a legal U.S. resident from Romania who told investigators he was living in his car, an old Lincoln Continental. He has a felony conviction for trying to break into an ATM in Los Angeles County in 2008, she said.
At a news conference before Axinte’s arraignment, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis called him a “brazen identity thief.”
“Customers had no idea their financial information was being compromised,” Dumanis said.
Bank investigators discovered that a man was installing a card-skimming device on the door of the bank’s ATM lobby every Saturday after closing time. He would remove it before the bank reopened on Mondays, district attorney’s investigator Joe Cargel said. This occurred for six weeks in a row.
Customers had to swipe their debit cards through the homemade skimmer, installed alongside the bank’s legitimate skimmer, to enter the ATM lobby.
Hidden cameras Axinte is accused of installing showed customers typing their identification numbers on the ATM keypads. Agents believe he transferred the account information onto fake debit cards to withdraw $300, $500, even $1,000 at a time at other ATMs.
The bank notified the Secret Service of the scam on Friday. Agents, with San Diego police and the regional fraud task force, were watching the bank Saturday night when Axinte returned to retrieve his device, and he was arrested, Cargel said.
San Diego police Detective Fred Helm said investigators don’t know what became of the stolen cash. Helm said card-skimming scams in the United States typically are controlled by East European, Russian or Romanian gangs, but there is no evidence linking Axinte to them.
“This may be the first one-man show we’ve run across,” said Helm, who is assigned to the regional fraud task force.
pauline.repard@uniontrib.com •
