Tragedy in Miami: three people arrested accused of identity theft of victims of the collapse

South Florida authorities under the direction of the State Attorney’s Office arrested three people accused of stealing the identities of at least seven victims of the Surfside tragedy, some of them deceased and others surviving.

As confirmed by the prosecution, it is Betsy Alejandra Cacho Medina, 30 years, Rodney kick, 38 years old and Kimberly Michelle Johnson, 34, who were arrested this morning after weeks of investigation. The three suspects repeatedly face racketeering and identity theft charges.

“Evidence Says Medina Spent Fraudulent $ 1 Million, Johnson $ 500 Thousand, Choute $ 430 Thousand, without counting the enormous number of transactions which were rejected by the banks ”, reported the public prosecutor Katherine Fernandez Rundle.

Just over two months after the South Champlain Tower, located on Miami Dade Beach, where 98 people died, collapsed, These three detainees are accused of having obtained the names and dates of birth of the victims from press articles in the days following the tragedy.

With this data, they opened credit cards and the prosecution has the audio recordings when they called to request these cards. A few days later, with these cards in hand, the prosecution found security videos in the Aventura mall where they are seen shopping for luxury at a store. Among the purchases made, several stand out wallets thousands of dollars.

What kind of person can do something like this? I wouldn’t want to be those people because all of South Florida is going to be outraged by it. It is the re-victimization of the victims that we live with these scammers“The mayor of Surfside told local press, Charles Burkett.

“We have worked so hard to do all we can to bring the families who have lost loved ones and the survivors of this landslide back to some normalcy. What a tragedy that there are people who want to exploit this situation“reflected the mayor of Miami-Dade, Daniella Levine Cava, who spent weeks with the victims after the building collapsed.

For some relatives of the victims, it is unfortunately no surprise that this has happened. A month after the tragedy, several of them reported that thieves had tried to open credit cards in the name of the deceased. Police say the sister of one of the victims (whose identity has not been disclosed) He reported that ten days after his death, notifications about bank password changes started appearing on his sister’s tablet. this made her suspect that someone wanted to use her sister’s identity to commit fraud.

The mayor of Surfside himself was one of the first to alert authorities to what was going on. “We had discussions with the families where we had to listen to them tell how they received alerts for new credit cards on behalf of their deceased loved ones. or how the charges appeared on the cards on behalf of some survivors. The recommendation was to close the cards immediately, ”Burkett said.

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