NYC DA: Crime ring targeted Apple stores

Two sophisticated criminal rings that used stolen credit-card data to buy and fence merchandise from Apple stores have been charged in a $1 million cyberfraud, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced Wednesday.

Twenty-six defendants from Queens and Brooklyn who Vance said bought stolen data from overseas websites and recruited "shoppers" to use forged credit cards were accused of ripping off iPods, iPads and other goods at stores from Levittown and Manhattan to Oregon and Florida.

"Cybercrime and its close cousin, identity theft, are the fastest-growing crimes in the United States," Vance said. In his office, those cases were up 50 percent last year.

The two overlapping conspiracies, dubbed "S3," operated by putting stolen credit-card data onto magnetic tapes on the back of fake cards, but embossing the actual name of the criminal "shopper" on the front of the card.

That way, the shoppers could produce genuine ID to a cashier, officials said. Authorizations from credit issuers apparently did not ensure that the name on the card matched the name of the actual holder of the account identified on the magnetic tape.

Officials said the leaders of the two rings were Shaheed Bilal, 28, of Brooklyn, who was accused of running it at one point out of the Rikers Island jail through his girlfriend, and Anthony Harper, 28, of Brooklyn.

One defendant posted a video bragging about his use of a stolen card on Twitter.

Vance said that during the arrest operation, executed in conjunction with the U.S. Secret Service, officers found $300,000 in cash, credit-card manufacturing tools, and three firearms and ammunition.

"What we see in this case is the intersection of street crime and cybercrime," Vance said.