Deal Hot: Trump Resort Worker Arrested In Miami On Fraud Charges, Trying To Generate Credit Card Points

Authorities in Miami have arrested a (now ex) employee of the Trump Resort in Sunny Isles Beach and charged him with multiple counts of fraud after he ran a scheme to collect credit card points through his own card and pocketed cash payments to pay off the cards.

The former employee accepted cash payments from guests but then pocketed the money and ran his own credit cards in order to collect loyalty rewards or cashback.

While the associate didn’t steal anything outright, his actions still caused a financial loss for the property due to credit card merchant fees that apply to card transactions.

The damages were stated at US$3,100 in his charging docket, and that suggests the amount of cash he funneled through the front desk using this method must have been considerable, as most credit cards do not carry more than 1.5-2.5%.

As reported by NBC Miami the 23 year old is currently awaiting trial on 4 counts and was granted a $6000 bail bond, however an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detainer keeps him locked up.

A former receptionist at the Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach was arrested on grand theft and other charges in an alleged guest payment scheme, authorities said.

Lukas Nicolas Varela-Torres, 23, was arrested Wednesday on charges of grand theft, organized scheme to defraud, offenses against computer users, and unlawful use of a communications device, Miami-Dade jail records showed.

According to an arrest report, Varela-Torres worked as a front desk receptionist at the resort, where an investigation was launched last week after hotel management reported irregularities involving guest payment transactions.

The investigation found guests paid for lodging and other services in cash, but Varela-Torres later voided, reversed, cancelled or modified the cash transactions and replaced them with his own card-based payments, the report said.

Varela-Torres allegedly conducted the scheme on multiple occasions, costing the hotel credit card processing fees, the report said.

The total losses from the scheme were just over $3,100, the report said.

“I guess he worked at a hotel and he was taking the cash and voiding the transactions, and then he had an application where he was using these transactions I think to accumulate credit card points,” a prosecutor said during Varela-Torres’ bond court appearance on Thursday.

The judge set his bond at $6,000 but noted that he has an immigration hold.

A few things immediately come to mind here. For one, this isn’t a stupid scheme, considering the way he thought of it, but to execute it in such vast amounts as he did was really stupid.

Keep in mind that we’re talking about a large amount of cash that he not only took out of the register, but also caused a red flag on the accounting side, as departments wonder where all the cash money went that usually goes through the front desk.

Assuming these ~ 2% processing fee caused the aforementioned 3,100 in damages, that means we’re talking about $155k in cash. That is a decent amount of bills, and in times of big data, a sudden drop is very visible on a chart. Depending on the amount of cash Trump International usually takes in, of course.

Unless this runs over 12-24 months, replacing $155k with credit card swipes would raise a red flag quickly. Mostly because accounting and internal audit would suspect someone skimming the cash and stealing it, not because someone might replace the money with card swiped to collect points.

If you deposit large amounts of money at your bank that seem out of the ordinary, you also run into the possibility of the bank creating a suspicious activity report.

Interesting to see Judge Mindy Glazer presiding over this trial, she has a lot of social media and Youtube videos and seems to be a fair judge. I’m even more surprised that this guy looks like a caveman but was employed like this at the front desk of the Trump International in Sunny Isles, which is a rather posh hotel.

In any case, I guess to a point, the company was glad to discover the money wasn’t gone and all they lost were some measly $3.1k in processing fees which they would have paid in most cases anyway hadn’t this guy actively asked guests for cash.

I’m actually surprised the hotel made a big deal out of this rather than firing the employee for his misconduct, considering it wasn’t an outright theft. They just threw a bunch of charges at the guy, all for $3100 and collecting some credit card points.

I have to say, though, running this at a Trump hotel wasn’t very smart either. Had this been any other property, he’d have probably gotten away with simply being fired or at least not catching such serious charges. Let alone that his immigration status now caused him to be detained as a result of his arrest.

Conclusion

An employee of the Trump International in Sunny Isles Beach was arrested last week as an internal investigation unveiled an odd scheme that ended up costing the hotel roughly $3100 in damages in the form of credit card processing fees.

The former front desk associate asked guests if they could pay cash (and to my surprise, many actually did so) after which he gave them a receipt and then re-processed the transaction with his own credit card. There must be many guests traveling with thousands of dollars in cash, otherwise, how do you pull this off!?

In any case, based on the usual merchant fees for cards, he created about $3100 in damages, which suggests that he funneled ~ $155k through his card. Even if you use a 3X travel card like the Amex Green or Chase CSR for this, the maximum he got out of this is 450k points.

Unless there is something bigger that we don’t know about, I wonder why they didn’t just ask him to reimburse the company and then fire him. He could have even cashed out the points to cover the 3k. Is this attention and effort really worth it for a case that wasn’t outright theft? He probably didn’t even think this would arise to such a level of criminality.

I think most properties that aren’t in the public eye for obvious reasons would have handled this behind the scenes. All these charges are a bit ridiculous for what he did and the sums involved. On the other hand, it’s good that Florida takes crime seriously once charges are pressed.

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