Three people living in the New York City area have admitted to being part of a scheme to defraud Sprint that involved using the stolen identities of individuals with high credit scores to purchase over $1 million worth of iPhones
The trio would order the phones to addresses they were not associated with, track the delivery times, and then be there to pick them up when delivered either by showing the driver a fake ID or by removing them from the porch, Assistant US Attorney George J. Rocktashel said Thursday.
The phones, which retail for $749 each, would then be taken to New York City and sent overseas where they were sold, Rocktashel said in outlining the government’s evidence against the three in US Middle District Court. In all, 1,630 cell phones valued at $1,338,247 were ordered using fake accounts, but only 888 were lost because the others were not shipped, Rocktashel said.
To date, 390 individuals in 14 states are known to have had their identities stolen, according to Rocktashel, including residents of Centre, Mifflin, Montour and Northumberland counties.
Centre County was a hotbed of the illegal activity in January 2019, and that is where one of the three people charged, 33-year-old Andrew Craig Herdsman, was arrested. The other two, Horace Henry, 42, and George Ernest Bobb, 36, were arrested in July 2019 in Delaware. Herdsman and Henry admitted to using fake IDs to pick up phones in Centre County while Bobb said he did the same in Delaware…Â Patriot-News