NORTH FORT MYERS, Fla.- Alfonso Maragoto Silva, 49, of 6804 W. Hanna Avenue in Tampa was arrested and charged with four counts of possession of a cloned credit card, after a routine traffic stop.

On Thursday, LCSO detectives conducted a traffic stop on a Buick SUV that was following too closely in North Fort Myers on I-75. The SUV was following a motorcycle at approximately ½ car length at 70 mph.

During the course of the traffic stop the passenger, Alfonso Maragoto Silva opened his wallet to produce identification and the detective could see a blue Orchard Bank Platinum Visa credit card which was of a poor quality. The detective was able to recognize identifiers that indicated the card may be a counterfeit. These included a very poor print quality compared to legitimate credit cards and a Visa emblem that was also of a poor quality.

The detective asked if the card belonged to him and Silva said the Visa card and all the other cards in his wallet were in fact his and they were not fake. When the detective pulled the four cloned cards from the wallet, Silva denied they were cloned and told the detective to check them.

The detective then utilized a magnetic card reader to check the four suspected cloned credit cards. The numbers on the back of the card encoded on the magnetic strip did not match the BIN numbers embossed on the front of the card. A check of the read magnetic strip numbers on the US Secret Service website showed that the numbers were issued to different banks. This showed that the cards were counterfeit.