Tough to swallow: Suspect ingests USB drive

Federal agents in New York followed evidence of a credit card skimming case all the way into a suspect’s intestines.

According to the Web site The Smoking Gun, the “giga-biter,” Florin Necula, was in the custody of U.S. Secret Service agents in Brooklyn awaiting questioning after his arrest in Queens, N.Y., on Jan. 21 when he took the USB drive that was on him and swallowed it.

Necula still hadn’t passed the device after about four days, and doctors became concerned he would be injured if it remained inside him, Agent Joseph Borger wrote in an affidavit. Necula eventually agreed to allow doctors to remove it from his intestines, which they did at New York Downtown Hospital.

It remained unclear whether stomach acid might have damaged the Kingston-brand thumb drive and made it more difficult to retrieve data. “As you might imagine, we have no actual experience with someone swallowing a USB,” Kingston executive Mike Sager wrote in an e-mail to The Smoking Gun.

Necula was charged with obstruction of justice for swallowing the drive. That’s just one of four felonies he’s charged with for the identity theft scheme he and three others are accused of hatching.

Authorities say they placed a device over ATM card slots to “skim” information from the magnetic strips of customers’ cards. In such cases, the information is downloaded from the device and then re-uploaded onto bogus cards to be used for fraudulent purchases. After Necula and his three accomplices were arrested, agents found laptops, cameras, USB drives and cell phones on them, as well as at an apartment.

As for the obstruction charge related to Necula downing the gadget? Naturally, his lawyer finds that charge hard to swallow. “They didn’t have a right to take it from him,” attorney Sanford Talkin told New York’s Daily News