Opinion ID: 697244
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Credit Card Scheme

Text: 7 During these plea negotiations, West also engaged in a second fraudulent scheme. Several years earlier, when working for a different courier company, West had obtained keys to certain lockboxes used by the Hecht Company to store documents awaiting pickup by a courier. In July 1993, West used these keys to remove from the lockboxes credit card receipts and other paperwork documenting credit card transactions, from which West compiled a list of valid Visa and MasterCard account numbers. Using these account numbers and a point-of-sales terminal West had installed in his home (also the office of CNUSA) in Northwest Washington, D.C., West processed over 1000 fraudulent credit card transactions, totaling $413,824.70. The transactions were credited to a merchant account West had opened for CNUSA in 1992 at First Premier Bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. When West asked First Premier to transfer these funds to his local account in Washington, officials at the bank became suspicious of the large number of transactions in what had been essentially a dormant account, and they contacted the FBI. West's credit card scheme was thus thwarted before any of the fraudulently acquired funds reached his Washington, D.C. account.