Chattanooga P.D. Catches Two Men With Gas Pump Skimmer

The Chattanooga Police Department has arrested two suspects attaching skimming devices to a local gas station pump.
It’s believed the suspects are a part of a multi-state organized crime ring.

LT. CRAIG JOEL, CPD  “The odds of this kind of capture are right up there with a meteor strike. They had to be caught in the act”.

Chattanooga police investigator Lt. Craig Joel told us last week about credit card skimmers found at a couple of Mapco stations.
To actually capture suspects at one of the same stations, was unexpected.
But Officer Rodney Proffitt was at the station on Highway 153 when he spotted two men in a vehicle towing a white u-hall trailer.
In his report he stated one of them was working on a card reader. They saw him and fled the scene, dropping a key to the pump.
He stopped their vehicle on Berean Lane.

LT. CRAIG JOEL, CPD  “They got out of the vehicle. Actually cooperated fairly quickly….as they…as they had been pulling back there they threw something out of the window..that lo and behold turned out to be a ribbon that was a skimmer device. There was..what the person had been doing was placing a uh by-pass inside that gas pump to capture credit card information and more importantly, pin information.”

The men were identified as 36 year old Rafael De Los Rios, and 34 year old Yoandy Cendeo Pena, both of Tampa, Florida.

Rafael De Los Rios

Yoandy Cendeo Pena

LT. JOEL  “This was part of an interstate ring that had been going around. As a matter of fact it was the same 2 people that Secret Service had been seeking in the last few weeks.”

Also recovered were 2 laptops believed used to recover credit card information from the gas pumps.

LT. CRAIG JOEL  “Its money straight out of your bank, its not protected by a credit card company. So people are really hurt by this, immediately, and if their identity is stolen, in addition to this..it can take years, sometimes a decade to clean all that mess up.”

The U.S. Secret Service has now taken over that investigation.