Duo Sentenced in Dunkin' Donuts Gift Card Scheme: Queens DA

Two Romanian nationals have been sentenced to up to three years in prison for stealing more than $17,000 from a Queens bank through multiple unauthorized withdrawals that had been re-encoded with stolen bank account information, the Queens district attorney said.

Daniel Gheorge and Ionel Cristian Popa, both of whom are 33 years old, pleaded guilty last month to grand larceny charges before Queens Supreme Court Justice Fernando Camancho, Queens DA Richard Brown said.

On Wednesday, the judge imposed an indeterminate sentence of one to three years in prison.

“The defendants should have used the Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards to purchase coffee and donuts,” the DA said. “Instead, they have just bought themselves up to three years in prison.”

The defendants were spotted by police on March 31 as they made a number of unauthorized withdrawals from an ATM machine in the vestibule of a Chase Bank branch on Hillside Avenue in Hollis, Brown said.

Gheorge and Popa, both of whom were in the United States on journalism visas, stole a total $17,703 by using the rechargeable gift cards that had been re-encoded with information from accounts at Chase Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC, Maestro, Nuvision Federal Credit Union and U.S. Bank National Association.

During each transaction, the defendants stuffed large amounts of cash into their pockets, the DA said.

At the time of their arrest, police seized the cash as well as 66 Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards.

Each gift card from the coffee shop is market with a 16-digit vendor account number. But none of the account numbers displayed on the seized cards matched the account numbers encoded on the cards’ magnetic strips, Brown said.