Pair charged with putting skimmers on ATMs

Two men have been charged with putting skimmers on ATMs in Halifax County, and authorities said their crimes could extend as far as Raleigh.

Posted 11:49 p.m. Feb 16, 2018 — Updated 5:41 p.m. Jul 13, 2018

Gina Benitez

, WRAL anchor/reporter

WELDON, N.C. — Two men have been charged with putting skimmers on ATMs in Halifax County, and authorities said their crimes could extend as far as Raleigh.

Johan Carlos Gamez Castillo and Hender Pena Aguilar, two Venezuelan nationals, were arrested Thursday after someone saw two men tampering with a State Employees Credit Union CashPoints machine on U.S. Highway 158 in Weldon.

Police Chief James Avens said his officers and other area law enforcement agencies staked out the ATM and arrested the two men when they returned to retrieve the skimmer placed on the machine.

The skimmer reads the account information off the magnetic strip on the back of each ATM card, and it was attached to a cover that wrapped around the keypad. A tiny camera was embedded in the cover to record people entering their personal identification numbers, police said.

"You have to have a trained eye to know what you're looking for," Avens said Friday, admitting that even he was impressed by the sophistication of the skimmer.

Castillo and Aguilar each face two counts of card theft with a scanning device and one count of injury to personal property. They were being held Friday in the Halifax County jail.

Avens said the pair also is responsible for putting a skimmer on the same ATM in November, and he said they likely hit other ATMs across the region.

"They are actually moving around – they are from Florida. There's no telling how many ATM machines they have been in contact with since their time of being here," he said.

"I'm glad that everything happened the way it did and they were actually caught this time," ATM customer Erik Parker said.

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