BREAKING! Three Graverobbers Who Stole The Identities Of Surfside Victims Have Been Arrested

In connection with the fatal Surfside condo collapse earlier this year, some family members of victims are claiming the identities of their dead relatives have been stolen by a group of criminals.

According to The Hill, three persons have been charged with a variety of crimes relating to identity theft including stealing a minimum of $45,000, which does not include an additional $67,000 that they attempted to steal.

The Hill reported:

Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said in a news conference that the actions of the thieves were first identified by a sister of a deceased victim on July 9, roughly 16 days after the building collapsed.

The sister told the Surfside Police Department that she had noticed the victim’s mailing address had changed and replacement credit cards were requested after the collapse. There were also multiple wire transfers from the deceased victim’s account, and several fraudulent purchases on the replacement credit cards, authorities said.

Rundle said the suspects stole the identities of at least seven victims of the building collapse, two of whom are not deceased. There were also two other victims that were not part of the building collapse.

“These individuals appear to be very skilled identity thieves. They’re professionals,” Fernandez Rundle said. “Except for their names, almost nothing else about them seems to be true.”

“We discussed that cyber-grave robbers move quickly after the collapse to grab what they could from deceased victims while families and friends were in emotional turmoil,” Fernandez Rundle also said.

“Their motto could’ve been, ‘Your loss is our gain’,” she added.

“Today, they got what they deserved,” said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett.

In July, Burkett said that crooks were looking to take advantage of victims of the tragedy.

“It’s the revictimization of the victims that we’re sort of starting to experience right now with these hackers,” Burkett said at the time. “They’ve seen the names in the paper, they’re going right to that and we’ve had to have discussions with the families and listen to them telling us the stories about all of a sudden credit cards appearing in their names and things being purchased in their name, so we’ve told ‘em, you’ve got to immediately shut down your credit.”

They are scheduled to appear in bond court on Thursday, according to authorities. They were set to be held at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on Wednesday night on bonds ranging from $1 million to $500,000 to $430,000, according to the court schedule, as reported by Fox News.