San Jose police recently uncovered two fraud rings that recruited waiters at seven Bay Area restaurants and paid them to steal the customers' credit card information by sliding the cards through a "skimming" device. Then the ringleaders used the information to make counterfeit cards and used them to buy expensive merchandise that they either sold for cash or kept for themselves.

One of the restaurants is in Cupertino, but the police refuse to name anyeateries to protect them from bad publicity.

The police arrested 14 people for the series of crimes and uncovered losses up to $400,000, involving victims in California, Nevada, Utah and Washington.

The San Jose police started investigating the case in March 2003, when fraud investigators at Citibank told them that they had detected a credit card skimming scam.

Police arrested several suspects during the investigation, but they announced the case to the media on Feb. 18 after they identified prime suspects David Patrick Plunkett and Taurice Lemand Jourdan.

Plunkett, 22, was a San José State University student. He recruited his former classmates and friends and paid them $10 for each credit card they slid through a black skimming device they hid under their aprons. The device can hold as many as 10,000 credit card numbers.

Once Plunkett's group acquired the numbers, it sold them to another group that carried out similar schemes.

Plunkett was arrested last year on Nov. 6. He had been charged with similar crimes in the past but was able to evade the police by using false identifications.

At the San Jose apartment he shared with two friends, the police found several card-reading devices, equipment to make counterfeit cards and 80 pairs of expensive athletic shoes.

"Most people who commit identity theft make this their full-time job," said detective Ken Munson of the San Jose Police Department's high-tech unit. "It's very difficult to detect the scheme because most financial institutions don't have the manpower or computer systems to locate the cases."

Also facing charges for theft or identity theft are 12 others.

Anyone with information call Ken Munson at 408.277.3214 or Crime Stoppers at 408.947.STOP.