Student helped steal $1.3M

Man facing up to 32 years in prison for aiding ring of thieves

This 24-year-old college student had never worked a job, yet he owned two Mercedes that he bought all in cash. His income also helped buy his family home and powerboat through all-cash deals.

And if the cops ever asked how he got so rich, he planned to say the funds came from his mom’s work as a stripper. But it really was other people’s stolen money he was spending.

Now, Carlos Miguel Rodriguez is facing spending decades in prison. On Tuesday, the Miami-Dade College computer science student pleaded guilty in federal court to helping a ring of thieves steal almost $1.3 million from banks via a tech-savvy scheme based off forged checks.

The young man, who according to court documents operated as something of an IT guy for the fraud ring, faces up to 32 years in federal prison.

The thieves who Rodriguez worked with used cryptocurrency to buy stolen identities on the “dark web,” an online marketplace for criminals. They then wrote counterfeit checks against the bank accounts of the identities they stole.

They cashed the checks using counterfeit IDs in states such as Arizona and Utah. Court documents explain the thieves were so successful that they often grossed over $100,000 in a weekend, and netted a total of $1.3 million through their scheme.

Authorities allege that the young man and his family may have personally benefited from the fraud to the tune of a halfmillion dollars.

Rodriguez’s father, along with at least nine other people, have been indicted or convicted for being a part of the conspiracy.

Police learned of Rodriguez’s involvement when they raided his family home as part of an investigation into illegal cock-fighting rings in October 2018. Court documents do not explain how the cops came to suspect cock-fighting was happening there.

But the officers searching the house got more than they bargained for. According to court re

cords, a search of the premises yielded a pair of disposable cellphones, a laptop and a stack of forged checks.

The court documents lay out the young computer science student’s sophisticated role in the conspiracy. Rodriguez and others would obtain copies of checks from “bank insiders or other sources.”

Then Rodriguez would find and purchase the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of their targets from the dark web using cryptocurrency.

That information allowed him to access victims’ bank accounts online or by telephone. With that access, he would change a victim’s contact information and download copies of their checks, which he would later forge.

Sometimes, court documents say, he would do all of this from the Wi-Fi accounts of hotel rooms that he rented with cash to avoid detection.

Court documents note that, after his arrest in 2018, Rodriguez told cooperating witnesses that he planned to claim that the suspicious income came from “cash that his mother received working as a stripper, and that he had vetted the cover story with the manager of a strip club in Doral, Florida.”

It is unclear if Rodriguez’s mother actually works at such a business.

Rodriguez, of Northwest Miami, stood before U.S. magistrate judge Alicia Otazo Reyes in a Miami courtroom and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, and one count of aggravated identity theft.

Of the six people charged in Rodriguez Jr.’s indictment, he is the first to plead guilty.

Other co-conspirators have been charged in separate indictments. The date of his sentencing has not yet been determined.