New Jersey man charged with trafficking 675 Starlink terminals

SpaceX is making headlines, and this time, the drama isn’t about CEO Elon Musk or Mars.

Kelvin Rodriguez-Moya, 35, was arrested for allegedly illegally trafficking 675 SpaceX Starlink terminals that he purchased with stolen credit card information and for hacking into existing customers.

Starlink terminals are primarily used to bring Internet access to remote areas of the world via SpaceX satellites.

Related: Royal Caribbean Starlink partnership brings fast internet to the sea

The devices, worth about $400,000, were reportedly shipped to a home in New Jersey before he attempted to transport them via pickup truck to Newark.

“Typically, what happens is the suspect uses these devices to resell them and gain some type of monetary benefit,” Lawrence Township Police Chief Chris Longo said. “We received information from a resident that there were a large number of deliveries destined for a residence in our city.”

Rodriguez-Moya was reportedly stopped with approximately 220 devices in his truck while en route to Newark.

Rodriguez-Moya does not live at the address where the satellites were delivered, and the residents themselves were unaware of what was happening.

Related: Elon Musk’s Starlink will bring service to Iran, school buses

SpaceX’s director of payment risk and fraud, Bennet Woo, called the terminal recovery “the largest fraud recovery to date in terms of order of magnitude.”

Rodriguez-Moya has been officially charged with receiving stolen property and trafficking in stolen property (both second degree) and has a detention hearing set for March 8.

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