He Faked His Own Ambulance Emergency to Sneak Back In. His Real Job Was Draining Food-Stamp Accounts.
On the night of June 22, 2025, a Mexican ambulance pulled up to the San Ysidro border crossing carrying an unconscious “patient” with a bloodied face. The paramedic said the man had fallen. Customs officers noticed three things at once: the photos on his two IDs did not match his face, the documents were flagged lost or stolen, and the blood looked fake. A hospital exam confirmed it — no injury at all.
The “patient” was Marius Catalin Trica, a Romanian national and operative of a transnational crime network whose trade is stealing from the poorest Americans. His crew put card skimmers on store terminals, cloned the EBT benefit cards of low-income New Yorkers, and cashed the accounts out at Los Angeles ATMs — $60 and $80 at a time, from families who needed that money for groceries.
A federal judge gave Trica 18 months. That is one man, one sentence. The skimming industry he worked for has drained more than $310 million from California accounts alone — and this is the anatomy of how it works.
- 18monthsfederal prison for Marius Catalin Trica, sentenced March 6, 2026 — ICE
- ~$105Kin lossesfrom LA ATM cash-outs with New York victims' EBT cards, Aug. 2023–Feb. 2024 — criminal complaint
- $94025 mindrained from 13 different victims at one Wilshire Blvd. Citibank ATM on Sept. 17, 2023 — complaint
- >$310Mstolenfrom California EBT beneficiaries, June 2022–Jan. 2026 — DOJ, Southern District of California
- $47.7MNYC claimsin replacement benefits approved for 120,000 NYC skimming victims as of Jan. 2025 — NYC Mayor's Office
The scene reads like a movie because Trica meant it to. At about 8:31 p.m. on June 22, 2025, the ambulance rolled up to San Ysidro — the busiest land port of entry in the Western Hemisphere — with its “paramedic” driver at the wheel and a limp body in the back. The driver handed Customs and Border Protection two identity documents for the patient, in the name “Alfonso Paul Sanchez Prieto,” and said the man had fallen from something and was unconscious.
The officers were not convinced. As the HSI complaint affidavit lays out, the photos on the IDs did not match the man on the stretcher, the documents were flagged as lost or stolen, and the blood on his face appeared to be fake. He was taken to a U.S. hospital, where an examination found no evidence of injury. On his phone — an iPhone 16 Pro — investigators found WhatsApp screenshots negotiating his own smuggling for roughly $8,000, and photographs of his real Romanian passport.
“CBP officers also suspected that the blood on SANCHEZ PRIETO's face appeared to be fake.”
HSI Special Agent Jenae Combest-Smith · criminal-complaint affidavit · U.S. v. Trica
It was not the first time Trica had tried to force his way into the country. According to the affidavit, investigators tied at least three fraudulent identities to him, and his travel record is a map of denied entries: U.S. visitor visas rejected in 2016 and 2017, outbound-only U.S. flight records with no matching legal entries, and a string of expulsions across Latin America. What the ambulance stunt revealed was not a desperate migrant but a professional — and the government now had him.
This photo shows Marius Catalin Trica's attempt to be smuggled into the United States in an ambulance — his facial injuries are fake. It wasn't the first time he tried to illegally enter the U.S., and it is part of an overall theme of fraudulent behavior.
To understand why the government wanted him this badly, rewind to a single Los Angeles ATM. On September 17, 2023, between 9:01 and 9:26 p.m. — twenty-five minutes — Trica stood at a Citibank machine at 5670 Wilshire Boulevard and fed it a stack of cloned cards, one after another. Bank surveillance captured the whole thing: thirteen separate withdrawals, $60 to $80 each, draining roughly $940 from 13 different victims’ accounts.
Here is the detail that makes this a story about the vulnerable and not just about a criminal: the accounts were not bank checking accounts. They were EBT cards — the electronic benefit cards that carry SNAP food aid and cash assistance — belonging to low-income New Yorkers. The skimmers were installed on point-of-sale terminals; the numbers were cloned onto blank cards; and the cash was pulled out 2,800 miles away in Los Angeles. Every $80 withdrawal was a grocery budget that vanished from a family that had almost none to spare.
The Wilshire run was one night. Between August 2023 and February 2024, the complaint says, bank surveillance repeatedly caught Trica and his co-conspirators doing the same thing across Los Angeles with New York victims’ EBT cards, for total documented losses of approximately $105,000. That figure is the floor, not the ceiling — it is only what the cameras happened to record.
Trica was not a lone hustler. The HSI affidavit describes him as part of a Romanian Transnational Criminal Organization — a networked ecosystem whose crime groups, in the affidavit’s words, run “human smuggling, narcotics smuggling, money laundering…organized retail theft, gambling, prostitution, violence, credit-card skimming, and financial fraud schemes domestically and internationally.” Members are trained in Romania and Europe specifically to defraud Americans, cycle in and out of the United States illegally, and launder the proceeds back home into banking and real estate.
“Members of Romanian TCOs are trained to travel from Romania and Europe to the United States to defraud Americans, as well as United States government programs and banking systems.”
HSI criminal-complaint affidavit · U.S. v. Trica, 2:25-cr-00742-PA (C.D. Cal.)
Trica’s own movements fit the template. Two U.S. visitor-visa applications were denied in 2016 and 2017 over suspected criminal history. In January 2021 he was caught in the Dominican Republic carrying 29 credit-card skimming devices. Weeks later he was among 38 Romanian nationals stopped transiting El Salvador after Guatemala turned them away; two months after that, Colombia denied him entry alongside four other Romanians. He was, in short, a known quantity to half the hemisphere’s border authorities — and still he kept getting in.
The scheme (since June 2023): Trica and co-conspirators imported skimming devices and fake IDs, opened U.S. bank accounts and mailboxes under false names, installed skimmers on point-of-sale terminals, and cashed out victims’ EBT accounts at ATMs.
June 22, 2025: the fake-injury ambulance attempt at San Ysidro; a hospital finds no injury and phone evidence ties “Sanchez Prieto” to Trica.
July 28, 2025: arrested and ordered permanently detained; a Romanian interpreter is required at all proceedings.
Sept. 9, 2025: an 11-count indictment is returned in the Central District of California.
Nov. 2025 – March 6, 2026: Trica pleads guilty to bank fraud and is sentenced to 18 months; judgment is entered March 9, 2026.
The investigation that finally pinned him was itself transnational: HSI Los Angeles led it, working with HSI San Diego and HSI Bucharest, Romania’s organized-crime directorate and its Galati crime brigade, the New York City Department of Investigation and Department of Social Services, the NYPD, and the Beverly Hills Police Department. It took roughly two years of one case agent’s work to unwind a scheme designed to be untraceable.
'Undeterred serial scammer' Romanian national Mario Demarco got nearly three years for defrauding hundreds of banking customers after an ICE Providence, R.I., probe. We filed a detainer and are waiting to deport him after his sentence is served.
Trica is one node in a vast operation, and the numbers around him dwarf his own case. In the Southern District of California alone, prosecutors charged more than 50 people in March 2026 in schemes that stole over $310 million from California EBT beneficiaries between June 2022 and January 2026 — mostly through ATM withdrawals. In 2024, California’s Department of Social Services detected more than $126.8 million stolen from EBT cards in that single year. The FBI estimates that skimming, across all card types, costs consumers and institutions more than $1 billion a year.
The mechanics are low-tech and brutally effective. A skimmer — a thin device slipped over a card reader — copies the magnetic stripe. The number is cloned onto a blank card. A PIN is captured by a pinhole camera or a fake keypad overlay. Then the card is drained at an ATM, often in another state, before the victim ever notices. Los Angeles County’s own social-services department has resorted to public-service warnings telling benefit recipients to physically check card readers before every swipe.
And the victims increasingly eat the loss. For two years, a federal program let states replace stolen SNAP benefits — nationwide, GAO reports about $322.5 million was replaced to roughly 679,000 households. But Congress let that authority expire on December 20, 2024, and did not renew it. In New York, City Limits reports that more than $14 million in benefits has been stolen since the reimbursement program ended — money that, under the old rule, families would have gotten back, and now simply lose.
The uncomfortable question is why mag-stripe skimming still works in 2026 at all. Banks moved their debit and credit cards to chip technology nearly a decade ago precisely because the magnetic stripe is trivial to clone. Government benefit cards did not follow. The New York accounts Trica drained are administered by New York State and issued in a city then run by Mayor Eric Adams (D); the ATMs were in a city run by Mayor Karen Bass (D). And California, under Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), did not begin issuing chip-enabled EBT cards until 2025 — years after the private banking system had abandoned stripe-only cards as indefensible.
To be precise about it: the crime is Trica’s, and the crime is the crime networks’. But the vulnerability was a policy choice. When California finally rolled out chip cards, the governor’s own office announced benefit theft fell by 83% — a number that doubles as an admission of how much was preventable in the years the state left the old cards in the field. The technology to stop most of this existed the entire time.
The enforcement side is federal. Homeland Security Investigations is the investigative arm of ICE, a component of a Department of Homeland Security now led by Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R); the Trica prosecution ran through the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, the Trump-appointed office led by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bilal Essayli. In the ICE release, HSI Los Angeles Special Agent in Charge Eddy Wang framed the mission plainly.
“Our HSI special agents are committed to not only bring criminals like this to justice, but to ensure our most vulnerable citizens are protected from the global reach of fraud.”
Eddy Wang · Special Agent in Charge, HSI Los Angeles · ICE release, June 17, 2026
The victims’ side had an advocate too. Bedros Boodanian, the Chief Program Accountability Officer at the New York City Department of Social Services, was the one whose office flagged Trica to HSI in the first place. “Exploiting vulnerable New Yorkers for personal gain is especially harmful,” he said, describing how his office worked with investigators to build the case. It was a benefits-fraud watchdog in New York, not a border agent, who first pulled the thread.
Trica pleaded guilty to bank fraud and, on March 6, 2026, U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson sentenced him to 18 months in federal prison. The judgment was entered three days later. ICE describes him as a criminal illegal alien and has signaled he will face removal after his sentence — though, consistent with the record, that deportation has not yet happened, and we do not report it as done. Restitution was not disclosed, and we will not guess at a figure the court did not make public.
Eighteen months is worth measuring against the scale of the enterprise. In a companion Central District case, a different member of the same Romanian-skimming ecosystem, Catalin-Marius Graur, drew 10 years and $165,697 in restitution after prosecutors showed he had funneled an accomplice more than 36,000 stolen EBT card numbers over three years. Other cases are still open: the five people charged in a February 2025 California operation, and the 50-plus charged in the Southern District — all of them charged, not convicted, and entitled to the presumption of innocence Trica forfeited when he pleaded guilty.
Excellent collaboration between #HSI, @SecretService, @LASDHQ, and our Romanian counterparts.
A Romanian crime operative faked a medical emergency in an ambulance to smuggle himself into the United States. His actual work was draining the food-stamp and cash-assistance accounts of the poorest people in New York, cashed out at Los Angeles ATMs, $80 at a time.
His crew’s documented losses ran to about $105,000. The industry he belonged to has taken more than $310 million from California EBT accounts alone — much of it preventable, because the cards used a magnetic stripe that banks abandoned a decade ago.
Trica got 18 months, and the enforcement worked. The vulnerability that made him possible was a policy choice — and the families who lost their benefits after December 2024 no longer even get the money back.
