Three credit card scammers found guilty a decade after being arrested

Three men who 10 years ago were arrested and charged in what police investigators believe was the largest debit and credit card racket locally have been convicted for various breaches of the Cybercrimes Act.

Tetlow Frith, said to be the mastermind, Carlos Burton and Jermaine Vernon were found guilty in the Manchester Parish Court yesterday, marking the end of a trial that began in 2013.

They have been released on bail pending sentencing on December 8.

Frith, Burton and Vernon were arrested in November 2010 during a series of coordinated operations in Manchester.

At the end of the operations, detectives seized scores of credit and debit cards bearing the names of several Jamaican and American financial institutions.

Investigators also found an embossing machine like the ones used by banks to press numbers and letters on one side of the debit or credit card; magnetic strips which store information about the bank and the card owner, skimming devices used to harvest information from legitimate cards as well as laptop computers and other equipment used to make matching identification cards.

Investigators believe the ring was responsible for manufacturing hundreds of cards that were circulated across Jamaica.

"They had everything to make gold or platinum credit cards. These are equipment that costs tens of thousands of US dollars," one law enforcement source said.

According to evidence led in court by prosecutors Christine Spence and Hodine Williams, an unauthorised credit card transaction at a movie theatre in Mandeville was what alerted investigators to the scheme.

A ticket clerk at the theatre revealed, in a statement to investigators, that Frith gave him a "small device with a split in the middle" and instructed him to swipe credit cards in it as he processed payments for movie tickets.

He admitted that he complied with the request and recounted visiting Frith and two of his cronies and watched them attach the device to a laptop computer before downloading the information it captured.

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