Friday, March 21, 2008

Alabama: Two Sentenced for 'High-Tech' ATM Thefts

Val Walton writes in The Birmingham News:

A federal judge ordered a Birmingham woman who helped steal thousands of dollars from automatic teller machines to serve one month in prison instead of the 18-month prison term handed down earlier Thursday.

Prosecutors said James Real, 43, stole a database from Compass Bank that contained names, account numbers and customer passwords, while Laray Byrd, 29, bought a credit-card encoder and software to encode the information onto blank cards.

In a five-hour sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Virginia Hopkins varied from the sentence she first gave to Byrd, 29, after expressing a desire to give her a chance to continue working to take care of her two small children.

Hopkins ordered the ringleader, Real, a former computer programmer for Compass, to serve 42 months in prison for the bank fraud scheme that netted $32,740 from ATMs in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee.

The investigation turned up more than 200 bogus debit-type cards and the recovery of at least a million stolen accounts.

More here.

Hat-tip: Pogo Was Right

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