SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA - A former Rancho Cordova, California, gas station employee was sentenced last week to three and a half years in prison for stealing more than 2,000 credit card numbers, BNO News reports.

Pavel Abramyan pleaded guilty to stealing customers?? credit card data while he was employed at a Rocklin gas station in 2007. Customers of the station reported that during the time of Abramyan??s employ, the pump-side credit card reader was frequently not functional, and they were required to leave their credit cards with the attendant ?" Abramyan ?" while they pumped gas.

Abramyan later purchased thousands of dollars of merchandise with the stolen cards, which were eventually traced to him. Officers conducted a search of his home, where they uncovered a magnetic stripe card reader, a floppy disk reader and multiple floppy disks that contained account information from more than 2,000 credit card accounts. He also had eight credit cards issued in his own name that had been re-programmed with account information from the stolen cards.