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She was subsequently convicted on a similar charge. No fine. Two days in jail. Two days in jail means that you are booked in between 11:30 pm and midnight and get out as soon after midnight as they can process you.

The story we got about why the DA didn't present the case to the DA (and she signed a sworn affidavit admitting the entire thing) was that the DA "chooses not to prosecute victimless crimes".

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2008/ja ... ns-man-ye/

I didn't say she was too bright. Heck, she couldn't understand why my wife was upset or why she was fired.

ROR is "Released on own Recognizance".

seamusTX wrote:Smart crooks commit identity theft or white-collar crime, and many of them get away with it.

The smart, elegant "It Takes a Thief" criminal is probably rare.

- Jim

My wife was a victim of identity theft several years back. The perp was a woman who worked in her office and did the payroll there and had access to all of my wife's personal information. She opened up four credit cards in my wife's name, had the bill sent to the office and maxed them out (a total of $55,000). For some reason, she changed the address to our home address once they were maxed out. When the bill came in it didn't have much detail as the individual purchases were on previous month's statements. We had just moved into a new house at the time and my wife at first thought the statements were associated with some furniture she bought where she got 10% off if she opened an account with them. She made the comment that she didn't realize she had spent so much and was about to make a payment on it when she showed it to me (the first one that came to our home address). I thought it was odd that it was an AVON mastercard and suggested that she call and get the last five purchases (which you can usually do with the card company's IVR system). When none of those charges made sense, she hit "0" to talk to a representative. Because we couldn't come up with the code word (supposely my wife's mother's maiden name) we couoldn't get any info. After speaking to a supervisor, we were finally able to figure out what had happened when we were told that the account had an authorized user of xxxxxx, who was the person who worked in the office with my wife. We contacted the Dallas PD and filed a report with our suspicions. A couple of days later, a detective contacted us and got some info. He talked to the card company's fraud department and interviewed the perp. The perp told him that she had my wife's permission to set up the account and that she had given her the information to do so. He called us a couple of days later to go over what he had found. The detective (a black man) made the comment that the thing that convinced him that the perp (also black) was lying was that she had given "Washington" as my wife's mother's maiden name. He laughed and said that the last white person he knew of with the name Washington was "George".

The interesting thing is that the card companies won't get involved with helping to prosecute. They just write the money off and go on. As far as we know, the perp (who had given my wife some fairly expensive Christmas gifts - charged to the accounts she set up in my wife's name) did get arrested but was ROR and the DA never presented the case to the grand jury.
So it didn't cost her a dime and all it cost was a few (daylight) hours in detention and going before a magistrate.