Inside his Candlewood Suites room minutes from Disneyland, Christopher Bokosky possessed all the items he needed to commit massive identity theft.
Bokosky had his two laptop computers, iPhone, iPad Air tablet, a Wonder credit card embossing machine and a stack of plastic magnetic strip cards.
He also held an important figurative goldmine: the credit card numbers and photo copies of driver’s licenses for 543 unwitting guests at a San Clemente hotel.
But that’s not why Garden Grove Police Department officers knocked on Bokosky’s hotel door in January 2017.
They’d arrived to accompany a county social worker performing a welfare check on the parolee’s infant child sleeping inside a crib.
When a surprised Bokosky opened the door, he started to flee but the cops stopped him, looked around the room, saw the counterfeit equipment and notified the U.S. Secret Service.
After complete searches, federal prosecutors inside Orange County’s Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse accused him of possessing 596 credit card and debit card numbers belonging to victims as well as intending to execute a plan to steal between $250,000 and $550,000.
Federal guidelines called for a maximum punishment of 12 years, but in March U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna sentenced the 28-year-old Bokosky to a prison term of 70 months.
After he is released from custody, he must undergo supervised probation for three years.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
Maybe the baby was the ID thief?
Sorry, thinking of a Bugs Bunny cartoon…
Bugs Bunny was Warner Brothers.
He was napped at Disney Land. Maybe this was a Loony-Toons conspiracy!
Doh!
well he met some awesome people in the feds