2 Michigan men arrested after taking pictures with $89K they allegedly stole from ATM
Photos of two men holding large sums of money inside a Michigan hotel room are part of the evidence trail the FBI collected over a break-in to a Saginaw ATM.
The case detailed in a criminal complaint filed May 2 with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan involves $88,900 stolen from the United Financial Credit Union on Weiss Street in Saginaw. An agent with the FBI's Mid-Michigan Safe Streets Task Force alleged in the complaint that Samuel Fobbs and Johnathan Walker violated federal criminal law involving bank theft.
The break-in happened about 3 a.m. on May 12, 2024.
That night, two men wearing masks and gloves walked up to the ATM center outside the credit union building. They first tried to pry open one machine with crowbars.
Although that attempt did not get far, someone else who was driving a tan Ford F-250 moved the pickup close to a second machine. A large chain was connected from the truck to the second machine, and that effort pulled the front of the machine off, exposing the internal components that held money. Further pulling from the truck knocked the ATM off its foundation.
All three then started digging into the machine, then ran toward another vehicle on Weiss Street.
Two days later, someone notified authorities that pieces of the ATM were dumped near an I-675 underpass.
In the meantime, police learned the F-250 used in the bank theft was stolen.
Police got search warrants for records of mobile devices that were in use near the bank at the time of the theft. From that research, they determined the identity of one suspect. Contacts with a Louisiana sheriff's detective involved with investigating a similar ATM theft in Alabama led to a possible second suspect's name.
With that information, the FBI agent said, authorities were able to track one of the phones in a travel path from Texas to Michigan, and then back to Texas.
A search warrant on a suspect's phone showed that several phone calls were made directly before or after the crime, along with CashApp peer-to-peer money transfers from an account on that phone to other accounts.
Additional phone evidence cited in the complaint involved images taken from a hotel room in Saginaw and shared by text message on May 12, 2024, of two men holding up large amounts of currency for the photos.
Photos filed with court records over investigation of an ATM break-in during May 2024 in Saginaw, Michigan.
U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Michigan
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