NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) – A New Jersey man was charged this week after an investigation found that he allegedly purchased over 600 SpaceX Starlink terminals with stolen credit card accounts, according to police.
Kelvin Rodriguez-Moya, 35, of Newark, was charged Monday with second degree receiving stolen property and second degree trafficking stolen property, according to police.
The investigation started after the Lawrence Township Police Department received a tip about an unusually large number of shipments being made to a house on Roxboro Road in Lawrence Township in December 2023.
Rodriguez-Moya, was initially pulled over by cops on Dec. 4, 2023 while he had 223 SpaceX Starlink terminals in the back of his truck with labels addressed to various names at the same address, according to a criminal complaint obtained by CNBC.
Detectives started to look into the orders, conducted surveillance on the residence and during the surveillance saw Rodriguez-Moya loading a FedEx shipment of terminals onto other trucks.
According to the complaint, Rodriguez-Moya said that he was paid $300 to drive the terminals to Newark for resale.
Following a three-month investigation, detectives found that 675 SpaceX Starlink terminals, valued at nearly $400,000, were purchased online using stolen credit card accounts and were shipped to the same residence, police said.
Bennett Woo, SpaceX director of Payment Risk & Fraud, confirmed that this was SpaceX’s “largest fraud recovery to date by an order of magnitude," according to LTPD.
The investigation also found that the residence was being used as a shipping and storage location for the stolen items which were later picked up and taken to a place in northern New Jersey.
Bret Johnson, SpaceX CFO, stated that he was happy to see the stolen “kits” being retrieved and “fraudsters” being held accountable, according to police.
Rodriguez-Moya was taken to the Mercer County Corrections Center and is currently awaiting a detention hearing.