I found out how someone managed to withdraw money from my bank account. A few days ago Jeff was reading Torrance's local paper adorably named the Daily Breeze and found an article about a recent rash of ATM card fraud committed by a guy working at an Arco gas station in nearby Redondo Beach.
As I was reading the article and thinking about the location, Prospect and PCH, I realize that we went there once to get a bottle of water before going to the beach. So, I looked up the charge in my bank statements and found it on March 18th. Aha! Exactly during the time period that this guy was working there and stealing card numbers and PINs.
If you're not familiar with Arco/AMPM, it's a low cost gas chain owned by the much larger BP. They only take ATM and cash, no credit. So anyone who bought gas there was basically handing over all the information this guy needed to steal money. All he had to do was take that information and put it on a card with a magnetic stripe and literally take it to the bank.
The best part is that this guy gave a fake name, "Erick Volonski ", fake driver's license and fake address to get the job at this gas station. I think its a safe assumption that the owner of the gas station, a franchise owner affiliated with BP, didn't do even one smidgen of pre-employment screening. Had the owner taken a small, inexpensive amount of precaution over 1,000 of his customers wouldn't have been ripped off.
And yes, I'm sure everyone got their money back from their various banks. But that does come at a price. Banks carry insurance to cover theft, as well as run hugely expensive "investigative" departments for the sole purpose of investigating these and other types of crimes. If the banks never recover the stolen money (and surely they won't), our charges and fees go up. Essentially, the innocent people in this story did get their money back RIGHT NOW but will end up paying for it in the future.
Now that I'm aware of the hiring standards employed by BP and it's affiliates, I will never, ever use their stores. I will also never use my ATM card as anything but 'credit'. It's too risky. If you can't pay credit or cash, walk away and find somewhere else.
And because the guy who is suspected to have committed this crime has mysteriously disappeared with over 200,000 dollars from totally innocent people, I'm asking you to just look and see if you know these people. You never know. The internet is a weird place.


If you recognize either of these men please call the Redondo Beach police at 310-379-2477.
You can read the letter I wrote to the writer of the original article here. If this happened to you in the past few weeks and you've been to this store, please call the Redondo Beach police to make a report. Oh! And the bad news is that it isn't the same person who stole my unemployment check. Technically my ATM card and PIN were stolen before the unemployment check ever went missing. Two thieves in a matter of four weeks! Huh!