Members of a credit card cloning crew arrested in Costa Rica earlier this week reportedly placed skimmers at nude cabarets, among other commercial establishments, where they made off with account information that was ultimately used to make fraudulent purchases and payments.

As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star, a citizen of the United States was one of four suspects arrested by agents from the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initials: OIJ), and now more information is available in this case. According to a news report filed by the Cristian Cartín and Roger Soto of daily tabloid Diario Extra, the 24-yr old U.S. expat has been identified by the last name of James, a resident of Costa Rica, and he is also being prosecuted as the mastermind of this skimming crew.

The Diario Extra report also cited confidential sources that explain why this crew targeted exotic dancing locales, known in Costa Rica as “night clubs.” One of the suspects is reportedly the son of a businessman who owns two busy night clubs in San Jose. Furthermore, one of the suspects who has been identified by the last name of Alemán, owns a private security company that provided services to at least one of the aforementioned night clubs.

Some of the patrons whose credit cards were skimmed at night clubs in San Jose are from Costa Rica, Panama, the U.S., and European nations. Some of the fraudulent purchases took place in the U.S. as well as in ritzy stores in the western suburbs of Santa Ana and Escazú.

The Costa Rica Star previously detailed the credit card skimming mechanism as follows:

The devices do their work after a criminal inserts the thin plastic device into an ATM card reader [or merchant terminal]. The device than reads and stores every ATM users’ card information the moment they insert the card into the machine. The criminal returns later in the day and retrieves the device, which may by then have the full data of hundreds of cards stored on it. That information is later used to create clones of the users’ cards, or for online purchases.

The skimmers are also sometimes placed in the credit card terminals at retail establishments, restaurants, and other places that accept credit cards.