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FORT MYERS — The I-75 traffic stop bore telltale signs.
The driver who was pulled over, Marcos Duarte, and his two passengers, Mario Alan and Juan Sanchez Reyes, appeared nervous. They were driving from Miami to Tampa in a rented 2011 Chevrolet Impala. All three had long criminal histories of economic crimes.
To Lee County sheriff's deputy Suriel Rosario, everything pointed to the trio transporting cloned credit cards. And Rosario was right, searching the car and finding 123 cards with a potential value of nearly $1 million.
With increasing frequency, Southwest Florida deputies are turning traffic stops into large-scale busts of illegal credit card trafficking. Particularly in Lee County, they're patrolling Interstate 75 between Tampa and Miami, one of the nation's hotbeds for fraud-related activity.
"I'd say we're starting to see an increase in this type of crime, and it's a combination of us putting forth more effort to identify it when we see it as well as it getting more popular," said Keith Day, a Lee County sheriff's sergeant in the office's Economic Crime Unit.
Lee County deputies have made 20 arrests this year on charges related to counterfeit credit cards. That's the highest number in recent years, and equal to the total number of arrests made between 2006 and 2008 on those charges.
Recently, the arrests have involved seizures of dozens of fake cards at a time. In September, two Golden Gate Estates residents were caught with 20 cloned credit cards worth up to $160,000 if used, Lee County deputies said. A trio of Miami men were arrested by Collier County sheriff's deputies in August with fake cards, totaling $350,000 in available credit.
Those picked up by local deputies, though, typically aren't from Southwest Florida. They also aren't preying on Lee and Collier residents, compared with other areas across the country, Federal Trade Commission statistics show.
In 2010, the Naples-Marco Island area ranked 95th out of 384 metro areas nationally for identity theft and 157th for fraud complaints per capita. The Cape Coral-Fort Myers area had similar rankings, placing 99th in fraud complaints and 160th for identity theft.
"It's held pretty steady over the years from our people as far as reporting identity theft," said Dave White, a sergeant in the Collier County Sheriff's Office Economic Crime Unit.
Instead, those being stopped are working more in Miami, which has more identity theft reports per capita than any place else in the country.
"Geographically, (Southwest Florida) is a natural stopping point along the way to Tampa," said Vance Luce, deputy special in charge of the U.S. Secret Service in South Florida, which investigates financial fraud crimes. "South Florida is truly a hotbed for counterfeit credit cards or any type of fraud theft."
Local investigators have been working with the U.S. Secret Service to piece together prosecutions of these crimes, which are often time-consuming for budget-strapped law enforcement agencies. For each credit card containing a victim's financial data, an affidavit must be obtained. Getting those documents becomes more difficult when credit card companies cover their customers' losses.
"You've got 20 different credit cards and 20 different banks, for example, then you have to get a hold of subpoenas and victims," White said. "Then the victims usually get reimbursed (by the card company), and when you get reimbursed, you're less likely to cooperate."
Adding to the difficulty is the fact that criminals commit credit card fraud so often that investigators can't keep up with the workload.
The counterfeiters also can be difficult to locate. Some work overseas on international scams. Some run operations out of big cities. Others work at restaurants, stores or banks, stealing information one card at a time.
"Everybody's doing what we can, but it's become it's own cottage industry," Luce said. "You could give me double the number of bodies here, and I'd still tell you I need more. We're all fighting an uphill battle."
