Four men from Los Angeles and Las Vegas were busted for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manhattan bank accounts using fraudulent debit and credit cards, police said.
Chase Bank employees alerted the NYPD shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday that a man was at an ATM withdrawing cash from a flagged account at their Chelsea branch on Seventh Avenue near 24th Street and sent a picture of him to the cops.
Officers from the Manhattan South Grand Larceny Task Force arrested the suspect and recovered 92 phony debit and credit cards as well as $5,000 in cash.
Later that afternoon, the officers were tipped that another man was withdrawing money from a flagged account in an Atlantic Bank branch on Third Avenue near 58th Street, authorities said.
When they took him into police custody, they found $16,000 in cash on him, as well as 82 cards, cops said.
Two other accomplices were arrested in Midtown at Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, police said.
Cops carried out a search warrant of their hotel rooms and recovered $198,000 in money orders as well as $84,000 in cash and 200 phony cards. A magnetic strip encoding device was also found by the police.
Suspects Garegin Spartalyan, 39, and Aram Martirosian, 34, hailed from Las Vegas, cops said. Hayk Dzhandzhapanyan, 40, is from Whittier, California, and Davit Kudugulyan, 42, lives in North Hollywood, California.
They appeared in court today to face 380 counts of criminal possession of a forged instrument, as well as one count each of grand larceny and identity theft, among other charges.
Garegin Spartalyan and Davit Kudugulyan were granted bail of $ 2 million bond or $250,000 cash. The bail amounts for the other two men were set even higher.
At the arraignment prosecutors tied the men to “large-scale” laundering operations overseas that ravaged Americans in multiple states.
The identification theft crew are due back in court March 26.
With additional reporting by Sabrina Ford