Karina Arceo, Credit Card Fraud Scheme, California 2022

A Kern County woman has been sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervised release for her role in a massive credit card fraud scheme that netted over $825,000 in fraudulent purchases.

Karina Arceo, 34, of Wasco, was sentenced to 60 months in prison for conspiring to commit bank fraud and committing aggravated identity theft, announced U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert. Arceo and her partner, Miguel Leyva, stole the personally identifiable information (PII) for over 125 victims from patient files at health care providers in Kern County where Arceo worked.

The duo used the stolen PII to open thousands of fraudulent credit cards in the victims’ identities and made hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent purchases on the credit cards in Fresno County, Kern County, the Bay Area, and elsewhere. The fraudulent purchases included home appliances, furniture, wall art, automobile accessories, designer clothing and shoes, luxury camping equipment, tickets to concerts and sporting events, and travel, among other items.

Arceo and Leyva also resold many of the items that they fraudulently purchased for cash and reaped a windfall because they did not actually pay for the items. They used checks that had been stolen from companies in Kern County to access the companies’ bank accounts and make fraudulent payments towards the credit cards so as to keep their scheme going.

Arceo’s sentence was enhanced because text messages that she exchanged with Leyva showed that she was the leader of the scheme. Arceo would pull the stolen PII used to open the fraudulent credit cards from her cloud account and send it to Leyva. The text messages also showed that Arceo would coach Leyva on how to make the fraudulent purchases.

Leyva was previously sentenced to 65 months in prison. The case is the product of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph D. Barton and Arelis M. Clemente are prosecuting the case.

About $825,000 in actual losses were caused by the scheme, which ran from February 2016 through August 2022. The case serves as a warning to those who consider abusing access to patient files for personal gain.

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