“…Authorities said Jones and another man, Randy Ray Flaharty, 31, took boxes of monthly credit card receipts of hotel guests from a storage room…”
“…The receipts, officials say, were used to manufacture counterfeit credit cards in document “boiler rooms†and card “chop shops,†which they then used to buy $300,000 worth of merchandise in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana...”
“…The cardholders never realized their credit card accounts had been compromised until months, even years, after they stayed at the hotel. But the damage made it hard for some of them to get loans and left lingering headaches in trying to straighten things out, officials said…”
A San Antonio man was sentenced Friday to more than five years in federal prison for stealing thousands of credit card receipts from the Emily Morgan Hotel. The theft allowed conspirators to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise in three states, authorities say.
Cody Quincy Jones, 34, pleaded guilty in April to ID theft fraud, access device fraud, and aggravated ID theft. Chief U.S. District Judge Fred Biery gave him 41 months for the ID theft fraud charge and 41 months for the access device count, to run concurrently. The judge imposed 24 months on the aggravated ID theft charge, to run consecutively.
The merchandise, which included trailers, televisions, all-terrain vehicles and tires, then was resold or pawned.
The hotel didn’t learn of the thefts until August 2008, and since then, a Secret Service-led task force has ascertained it was San Antonio’s largest identity theft case, with at least 17,000 receipts stolen.
