Encinias Charged with Bank Fraud and Identity Theft

Lori Lloyd Encinias was recently charged with 43 counts of bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, access device fraud and mail fraud; she accepted a plea deal Tuesday, December 18.^[1]

Encinias appeared in U.S. District Court to plead guilty to two counts of access device fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft, after a federal grand jury indicted Encinias last September, accusing her of using stolen Social Security numbers to open at least three bank accounts and take out several credit cards.^[2]

According to a statement in advance of a guilty plea, Encinias admitted to taking out an Overstock.com Visa card over the Internet using a stolen Social Security number and made charges totaling $5,300 over a one-month period.^[3] She also admitted to using another stolen number to take out a CitiBank Visa card over the Internet to run up $4,900 in charges from December 2005 to August 2006.^[4]

Sentencing has been scheduled for March 3, 2008. She faces a maximum mandatory two years in federal prison for each identity theft count and up to 15 years for access device fraud.^[5]

Aggravated Identity Theft
Aggravated identity theft occurs when the crime of identity theft is coupled with another felony, here it is mail fraud. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1028A, if a person knowingly and unlawfully transfers, possesses, or uses a means of identification of another person in conjunction with the commission of a set list of felonies, that person will be punished as those felonies provide and that person will additionally be imprisoned for 2 years. If the felony happens to be a terrorism offense, that person will receive an additional 5 years of imprisonment.^[6]

Furthermore, that person will not be placed on probation, nor will the term of imprisonment run concurrently, unless the court has been given discretion to do by the Sentencing commission.^[7]Federal criminal attorney Douglas McNabb has also previously discussed identity theft in his blog, here; and the federal crime of mail fraud has been discussed, here.

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^[1] Deseret Staff, Woman pleads guilty on fraud, theft counts, Deseret Morning News, Dec. 23, 2007, available at http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695238473,00.html (last visited December 30, 2007).
^[2] Id.
^[3] Id.
^[4] Id.
^[5] Id.
^[6] 18 U.S.C. § 1028A (2007).
^[7] Id.