Two Venezuelan illegal aliens got 78 months each in federal prison for hacking ATMs to generate cash for Tren de Aragua, a designated foreign terrorist organization, and their arrests have now triggered 96 additional indictments coast to coast.
Carlos Javier Padron, 36, and Oddry Arnoldo Cabrera Torrealba, 37, were caught in October 2024 by Lincoln, Nebraska police while actively running a jackpotting operation. They were not caught planning one. They were mid-crime, on-site, deploying malware against a live ATM. A federal court sentenced each to 78 months in prison and ordered them jointly to pay $1,537,696 in restitution to the banks they hit.
The malware they used is called Ploutus. Once installed on an ATM, it lets the operator issue commands directly to the cash dispenser, forcing the machine to spit out bills on demand. It also deletes its own footprint to slow bank detection. Padron and Torrealba both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank burglary and intentional damage to a protected computer. The Justice Department confirmed both sentences this week.
What makes this more than a bank fraud case is where the money went. The Department of Justice stated explicitly that ATM jackpotting is Tren de Aragua's business plan and its assessed primary source of revenue. TdA was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration, and the DOJ description of the gang's activities is not abstract: human trafficking, armed robbery, murder, and flooding American communities with drugs. The cash from hacked ATMs in Nebraska, and dozens of other states, funded all of it.
The arrests of Padron and Torrealba were not the end. They were the opening. The investigation they triggered has now produced 96 additional indicted co-conspirators, with charges that go well beyond bank fraud. The expanded indictments include material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, money laundering, unauthorized access to protected computers, and conspiracy to commit each of those offenses. These are serious federal charges, not cleanup cases.
Padron himself was traveling under an alias. His co-defendant used the name "Luis Alejandro Berdugo Barraza" at various points, according to court records. Neither had legal status in the United States. Both entered and remained in this country illegally before deploying malware on behalf of a gang the federal government now classifies as a terrorist organization.
The Border Failure Behind the Case
The timeline matters. These two men were arrested in October 2024, near the end of the Biden administration, after years of record illegal crossings from Venezuela and other countries. Tren de Aragua's expansion into the United States tracked that same period almost exactly. The gang exploited porous borders not just to traffic people and drugs but to move operational cells, like Padron and Torrealba, who functioned as financial soldiers for the organization's cash generation arm.
The Trump administration designated TdA a foreign terrorist organization in part for exactly this reason: the gang was not just a street-level crime problem but a structured organization extracting revenue from American financial infrastructure and using it to fund violence. The 96 indictments now pending are a direct consequence of that designation, which opened the door to material-support charges that a standard bank-fraud prosecution would never reach.
ATMs running legacy software, in some cases Windows XP, were the vector. The Ploutus malware variant used in this scheme was engineered for those older machines, which remain common at independent and regional institutions. The victim banks that received $1.5 million in court-ordered restitution are real institutions, with real depositors, whose security was breached by people who had no legal right to be in the country.
Ninety-six defendants are still working through the federal court system. The charges they face, including material support to a terrorist organization, carry consequences well beyond what Padron and Torrealba received. Watch for those proceedings in the District of Nebraska and potentially additional districts as the DOJ continues to unwind the full network. The sentencings this week were the first convictions. They will not be the last.
Also read: ICE Has Now Arrested More Than 10,000 Gang Members Under Trump • Biden's DEA Allowed 1.8 Million Fentanyl Pills onto New Mexico Streets to Build Cases • Antifa ringleader draws 100-year sentence for armed assault on Texas ICE facility
