South Amboy, NJ gas station manager made $78,000 off customers at pumps

Amid historic and astronomically painful gas prices all over New Jersey, that have been on the rise in the Garden State for years, comes word that a gas station manager in Middlesex County made a pretty penny off of gas customers prior to the current situation at the pumps.

U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger announced that 40-year-old Umer Hassan Mir of South Amboy has admitted to using account information of more than 17 gas customers -- including Amtrak -- to make about $78,000 in fraudulent fuel charges.

Mir has pleaded guilty to knowingly and with intent to defraud effecting transactions with one or more access devices issued to other persons having a value over $1,000, over a one-year period of time, according to Sellinger.

He was working at a Delta gas station in Metuchen between February 2018 and August of 2021, when he allegedly entered fraudulent fuel charges onto fuel credit cards for Amtrak vehicles being leased by the General Services Administration, according to Sellinger, and then enter account information from those fuel credit cards to make it look like a transaction.

Mir then withdrew cash from the phony transactions from the gas station’s cash register and used the money for personal expenses and to pay another gas station employee for working extra hours for him.

If convicted, Mir faces a maximum potential penalty of 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the charge of access fraud and his sentencing is scheduled for December 13, 2022.

The government is represented by Senior Trial Counsel Leslie Faye Schwartz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Special Prosecutions Division.

Defense counsel: Mark Anderl Esq., Perth Amboy, and Guillermo Arango Esq., New Brunswick.