Fast-food manager charged with using customer's credit card

Knightdale police charged a restaurant manager this week with stealing a drive-through customer’s credit card information, court records show.

Police said Friday that the manager used the information from the credit card to pay his electric bill.

Leonard Carl Cuffee, 32, of 4440 Archibald Way was charged Thursday with one misdemeanor count of financial card theft and one felony count each of financial identity fraud and financial card fraud, Knightdale police Lt. David Simmons said today.

The alleged victim, Renee Curran, said she went on Sept. 10 to Smithfield’s Chicken and Barbecue on the U.S. 64 Bypass. School was about to be dismissed for the day and Curran, 38, said she drove up to the restaurant’s drive-through window to order food for her two children and mother.

She handed her Capital One Master card to the swing manager at the window and waited for him to quickly swipe the card and hand it back to her, she said.

“He took it and started hovering over the cash register. My mom was with me, and I couldn’t see what he was doing,” Curran said. “He told me he was sorry it took so long, but the card didn’t scan and he had to key my credit card number in,” Curran said.

About three days later, Curran said, she went online to check her credit card balance and was surprised to learn that it was over its spending limit by $100. Curran called her credit card company’s fraud department and found that someone had used her card to pay a $224.18 power bill with Progress Energy.

Curran asked if the name and address of the person who paid the utility bill with her card was available. An employee with the credit card fraud department gave her Cuffee’s name and address, she said.

She called Knightdale police with the information on Wednesday, and detectives arrested Cuffee at work one day later, Simmons said.

Cuffee remained in custody this afternoon at the Wake County Jail. He is being held under $15,000 bail, a jail spokesman said.