3 Men Arrested in Counterfeit Bus Pass Ring : Crime: Authorities say the phony documents might have cost transit agencies as much as $4.6 million over the last two years.

Transit Police announced Friday that they had cracked one of Southern California’s largest counterfeiting rings of its kind, believed to be responsible for printing fake bus passes that might have cost the transit agency as much as $4.6 million in lost revenue.

For the last two years, three counterfeiters printed 2,500 to 5,000 passes that were sold each month on Downtown and Westlake-area street corners for half the official $42 price, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said.

“That’s money taken right out of the pockets of taxpayers; money that the MTA could have used to improve bus service,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre, chairman of the MTA board. “We will not tolerate fare evasion, counterfeiting, or theft of transfers. If you do those crimes, you will go to jail.”

Taken into custody were Mario Unmanzor Hernandez, 39, Francisco Rodriguez, 49, and Fernando Rodriguez, 44. Police said Hernandez, who ran a printing business, was arrested at his shop; the other two men were taken by surprise and arrested in the Westlake district as they headed home about 4 p.m. Thursday. Officials said all three are from El Salvador and are in the country illegally.

During the raid, transit officers said, they seized 2,400 fake bus passes, printing plates dating to 1991, as well as equipment and a month’s worth of supplies used to concoct the passes. Police also found 17 negatives that could have been used in the reproduction of $5 and $10 food stamp coupons.

The bogus passes looked like the genuine ones except for one detail: the fakes all had the same serial number.

The men have been charged with forgery, punishable by up to a year in prison. But because of their immigration status, Transit Police said, they believed the men would be deported after serving time in jail.

MTA Transit Police Sgt. Mark Weissman, who led the investigation, said the agency believed that the men were selling the passes for $6 to $10 to a middleman who sold them to bus and rail riders for $20 to $25. The distributor of the passes has not yet been arrested.

As the quality of color photocopying has improved, the proliferation of counterfeit passes has escalated, MTA Police Chief Sharon Papa said.

“We’ve had a real emphasis on this problem because bus operators have been lifting more and more counterfeit passes,” Papa said. “This is a big business.”

In an effort to thwart counterfeiters, the MTA introduced metal tokens earlier this year and alters its passes monthly, changing colors as well as the holograms on the face of the cards. The holograms are usually the most difficult for counterfeiters to mimic.

In this case, the counterfeiters used a special foil to create the holograms, investigators said. The Transit Police detectives visited suppliers of that particular paper, asking for a complete list of customers. Over the two-month investigation, the detectives narrowed the list of possible suspects. They were aided by a tip from someone who had read a news account of a previous counterfeiting arrest.