Daniel Balan (MCSO)
A 46-year-old Tallahassee man is behind bars after a trail of stolen bank info, and a very specific choice of wardrobe led Monroe County detectives straight to him. Daniel Balan’s run ended Friday when he was booked on a laundry list of charges, including grand theft and the fraudulent use of personal identification, following a multi-county investigation that felt more like a game of high-stakes hide-and-seek.
The trouble started back in January 2025, when seven different people in the Florida Keys realized their bank accounts had been raided. It wasn’t just a few bucks, either; the group reported a combined loss of over $5,200.
When the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office started digging, they found a pattern of cloned credit cards and compromised PIN numbers. But the real break in the case didn’t come from a computer screen—it came from bank security footage.
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Detectives spotted a man on camera with a very specific look: a particular helmet, a face mask, a backpack, and wireless earpieces, all while pedaling around on the same bicycle. It was a disguise meant to hide his face, but it ended up becoming a neon sign for investigators.
The scheme started to crumble when Balan was caught red-handed in Leon County. Deputies there stumbled upon him in the middle of a fraudulent ATM withdrawal.
When they searched him, they found a stash of re-encoded gift cards loaded with stolen data. The kicker? He was wearing the exact same outfit—right down to the earpieces and the backpack—that had been caught on camera hundreds of miles away in the Keys.
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According to investigators, this wasn’t just a one-off crime. It was a coordinated effort to hop across county lines, using cloned cards and disguises to stay under the radar. Unfortunately for Balan, wearing your “crime outfit” to every job makes it pretty easy for the dots to be connected.
After a collaborative effort between departments, warrants were issued, and Balan’s cross-state fraud tour officially hit a dead end.
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