Five Venezuelan nationals have pleaded guilty in a US federal court in Kansas to conspiracy to commit bank larceny, after prosecutors said they tried to empty cash machines using a technique known as ATM ‘jackpotting.’ According to court documents cited by The Record from Recorded Future News, both attempts failed.
The defendants, Luis Alberto Velasquez-Artigas, 27, Royder Adrian Figuera-Perez, 29, Javier Mejia Jr., 27, Gabriel Alexjandro Corales-Garcia, 33, and Italo Lizandro Corrales-Carrillo, 26, drove from Indiana to Kansas in December 2025 to target machines in the small towns of Wamego and Manhattan, Kansas, prosecutors said.
How jackpotting works
ATM jackpotting is a physical hacking method rather than a purely digital fraud. Criminals break into an ATM’s outer casing, connect a laptop directly to its internal computer, and install malware that overrides the machine’s normal controls, ordering it to dispense every banknote it holds, regardless of any account or card being used.
In this case, the method failed. Both attempts in Kansas triggered alarms, alerting police before the group could collect any cash. Investigators identified the five suspects using surveillance camera footage and arrested them within days, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, which announced the case alongside the FBI, which led the investigation.
“Jackpotting bandits are sweeping the nation. This particular group’s strategy was to specifically target ATMs they thought were by design more vulnerable to malware.” — Ryan Kriegshauser, U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas, speaking to The Record from Recorded Future News
Velasquez-Artigas has since been sentenced to nine months in prison. The other four defendants are awaiting sentencing following their guilty pleas.
Part of a wider pattern
The Kansas case is not isolated. US prosecutors have brought several similar cases against Venezuelan nationals in recent months. In one, Carlos Javier Padron and Oddry Arnoldo Cabrera Torrealba were sentenced to 78 months in prison each for a jackpotting scheme that authorities linked to Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization with origins in Venezuela, according to the Washington Times. That case involved restitution of more than $1.5 million.
In a separate matter reported by SecurityWeek, Venezuelan nationals Luz Granados and Johan Gonzalez-Jimenez were convicted of jackpotting ATMs elsewhere in the US, with Gonzalez-Jimenez ordered to pay $126,340 in restitution. Together, the cases point to a recurring pattern that US authorities are treating as a coordinated criminal trend rather than isolated incidents.
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