Two illegal immigrants were sentenced to over six years in federal prison for stealing millions of dollars from ATMs in a hacking conspiracy known as “jackpotting.”
The Department of Justice said that Carlos Javier Padron and Oddry Arnoldo Cabrera Torrealba were sentenced to 78 months in prison for their scheme. The two Venezuelan nationals rigged ATMs and used malware to cause machines throughout the country to dispense large amounts of money, court documents revealed. The DOJ said Padron and Torrealba were connected to Tren de Aragua, the transnational terrorist cartel and organized crime syndicate that originated in Venezuela.
“TdA has expanded its criminal network throughout the Western Hemisphere and established a presence in the United States,” read a Justice Department release. “TdA’s criminal activities range from drug trafficking and firearms trafficking to commercial sex trafficking, kidnapping, robbery, theft, fraud, and extortion.”
“TdA has also developed an additional source of revenue stream through financial crimes that target financial institutions throughout the United States, including using ATM jackpotting to steal millions of dollars in cash,” noted the Justice Department.
In the investigation, it was discovered that Padron and Torrealba were part of a vast “sophisticated criminal network” of conspirators working to hack ATMs and steal money from the machines. Since their arrests, an additional 96 people were indicted on charges for roles in the ATM jackpotting conspiracy for a variety of charges, including “material support to a designated foreign terror organization” and a slew of other financial, money laundering, and banking crimes.
“Carlos Javier Padron and Oddry Arnoldo Cabrera Torrealba helped deploy sophisticated malware as part of a transnational criminal network that hacked ATMs across the United States and stole millions of dollars through a technique known as ATM jackpotting – which caused bank ATMs to dispense the cash inside of them,” said A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
They reportedly broke into ATMs, removed the hard drives, and installed malware known as Plotus to facilitate the “unauthorized withdrawal” of money. Padron and Torrealba deployed Plotus in person and co-conspirators used computer access to initiate commands to the ATMs to dispense cash, said the Justice Department. The sophisticated software would also “delete evidence of its existence to prevent financial institutions from detecting its use on ATMs.”
“This action is part of Operation Riptide, an ongoing FBI campaign targeting the criminal actors, infrastructure, and financial networks behind cybercrime, cyber-enabled crime, and fraud against the American people,” read a social media post by the FBI Cyber Division.
Padron and Torrealba pleaded guilty to “one count of conspiracy to commit bank burglary and one count of computer fraud and intentional damage to a protected computer.” In addition to the jail time, they were ordered to pay $1,537,696 in restitution, said the Justice Department.
“ATM jackpotting is TdA’s business plan and their assessed primary source of revenue to fund their terrorist activities that range from reprehensible forms of human trafficking to armed robbery, murder, and the general undermining of America’s national security by flooding our communities with controlled substances,” said Lesley Woods, U.S. Attorney for the District of Nebraska. “We will use these prosecutions to put a chokehold on their funding pipeline.”
