Opinion ID: 792181
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Defendant's Offense Conduct

Text: 2 Valdez was convicted for participating in a scheme in which he defrauded long-distance telephone carrier AT & T out of well over $200,000 in long distance telephone services between May 1998 and his arrest in April 2001. An acquaintance, Guillermo, taught him how to defraud AT & T by calling AT & T to retrieve calling card numbers, pin numbers, and passwords for names randomly taken from the phonebook. Access to the numbers obtained allowed defendant to place and sell thousands of domestic and international telephone calls. 3 Over several years, an investigator from AT & T's Network Fraud Management Department used the company's database to discover that an individual, later identified as Valdez, placed numerous illegal telephone calls from pay phones near a bus terminal in the Washington Heights area of New York City. The investigator further learned that this individual tested the validity of calling card accounts he had acquired by calling an unsubscribed telephone number in Florida and another one in Mexico. The investigator reported that the Florida test number had been called 3,300 times and the Mexico number had been called nearly 2,000 times. From these records, the company estimated its loss from fraudulent calls initiated by Valdez at $249,643. 4 On several occasions between December 2000 and January 2001 the investigator placed a recording device, pursuant to federal law, on the suspected pay phones. During the recorded calls, Valdez typically opened numerous accounts during a single call. He succeeded in this ruse by offering false explanations for his actions including posing as a building owner attempting to obtain numbers on behalf of his tenants. A review of the tapes also revealed that defendant sometimes requested special access to certain countries as a means of overcoming AT & T's default prohibition on calling card calls to those countries due to numerous incidents of fraud associated with such calls. 5 In December 2000 AT & T's investigator notified the U.S. Secret Service of Valdez's criminal activity. During the next few months, Secret Service agents observed defendant placing calls on a pay phone on many occasions. The agents determined that these calls were for the purpose of opening AT & T calling card accounts. On some occasions Valdez was observed holding pieces of paper with numerous names and addresses on them. During one of the surveillances, defendant placed a call on a pay phone while motioning to another individual who then approached the phone and handed cash to Valdez. 6 On April 2, 2001 Secret Service agents arrested defendant and interviewed him. Defendant told the agents that he had obtained calling cards in other people's names and had sold calls to people on the street using those numbers. During a search of his apartment, agents found hundreds of pieces of paper containing names, addresses, calling card numbers, pin numbers, and passwords. From this evidence and the company's database, AT & T estimated that Valdez had fraudulently obtained and possessed over 1,176 calling card numbers.