Identity Thief Thursday: Kansas City Man Sentenced to 19 Years in Jail, 500K Fine

May 22, 2008

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Somehow Kansas City seems to be a hotbed of identity theft. First the Kenyan id theft ring, and now a KC man has finally been sentenced to a massive identity theft ring that was busted in 2006.

Carlton Strother has been sentenced in federal court to 19 years 6 months in prison and ordered to pay $580,225 to his victims.

You have to be pretty good to be the leader of a ring that at one point had up to 50 suspects.

Strother wasn’t your run-of-the-mill identity thief doing dumpster diving for preapproved card offers. He used computers and holograms to make fake drivers licenses.

He and his buddies then got credit and went on spending sprees. There were at least 100 victims of this particular ring.

They got some local businesses into the act too. One particular car dealership had a crooked employee that was supplying financial information on customers.

“They would go and buy high quality electronics, big screen televisions, computers, different things like that, and then they would bring them back and then they would either have them sold off, take them in payment for making the false ID or other things. We’ve actually seen them transferred from car to car,” Green said. “We approximate about $5 million worth of losses just in this particular area and this group.”

It’s nice to see someone getting a relatively stiff sentence for this sort of thing. Too often it’s just a slap on the wrist. I am sure the people who got $4,000 phone bills are thrilled. It doesn’t sound like Carlton is taking too much personal responsibility for this though: