TUCSON, Ariz. – The head of a ring that manufactured phony credit and debit cards to drain accounts at credit unions and banks was sentenced to more than five years behind bars Monday.
Robbin Brown, 27, was one of 17 young people charged in an identity theft ring that obtained personal account information from sources all over the world on Internet chat rooms, then created counterfeit cards to steal more than $1 million from those accounts at ATMs throughout the area. In an instance in March 2005, the ring used one of the bogus cards to withdraw $148,000 in cash from ATMs at Casino Del Sol in Tucson.
The ring hit members and customers at various local credit unions and banks, including DM FCU (now called Vantage West CU), M&I Bank and Bank One (now JP Morgan Chase).
The conspirators, most of them under 25 years old, paid the overseas suppliers of the information in Pakistan, Vietnam, Jordan, Russia, Romania, Canada, Mexico, Morocco and Estonia a commission, generally less than 50% of their earnings, according to prosecutors.
The suspects lived in two houses in Tucson and made counterfeit cards by using blank cards and encoding the magnetic stripes with the stolen information.
Brown was sentenced to 66 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release. In addition, he was ordered to forfeit electronics and other property he purchased through the scam, and to return funds to his victims’ credit union and bank accounts.
Several other participants, including Jacob Green-Bressler, another ringleader, have been jailed. Green-Bressler last year was sentenced to seven years behind bars. Before being sentenced, defense lawyers introduced a letter to the judge from Green-Bressler’s parents saying his computer skills were so great, he was offered a job at Microsoft at the age of 12.
