A 47-year-old New York woman was sentenced Monday to 90 months behind bars for victimizing more than 50 people — many of them Fairfield County residents — in an identity theft and credit card fraud scheme, the US Attorney’s office said.
Lisa Reid, of Amityville, New York, was sentenced by US District Judge Michael P. Shea in Hartford. After serving her 7.5-year prison sentence, Reid will also have three years of supervised release.
According to court documents and statements made in court, Reid was involved in a scheme between February 2015 and January 2017 to defraud credit card companies and their customers by fraudulently taking over credit card accounts and, using those accounts, making unauthorized purchases from high-end retailers.
As part of her scheme, Reid used publicly available information to obtain phone numbers for individuals living in affluent areas, the Connecticut US Attorney’s office said.
According to the US Attorney’s office, police departments in Greenwich, Stamford, Norwalk and Shelton helped investigate the case along with US law enforcement agencies.
According to the US Attorney, Reid called her victims pretending to be a representative of a credit card company and claiming the firm needed information about their account.
The victims then provided Reid with their account information, including credit card numbers and passwords. Reid then contacted the credit card company, pretending to be the victim, the US Attorney’s office said.
After providing all of the requested security information, she added a new phone number and address to the account. The address was typically an abandoned or foreclosed property near her home in New York.
Reid then used the compromised credit card accounts to order merchandise from high-end retailers and had the merchandise shipped to an address that she had previously added to the credit card account, the US Attorney said… CT Post
