I have credit card abuse case involving an operation with three bad guys - the mastermind, middleman, and a waiter. A local police agency and the Secret Service get word of a skimming device that is about to be transferred among the bad guys. Before the waiter actually steals his customers credit card numbers and stores them on the device, the police come in, intercept the the skimming device and get the waiter to cooperate with them. In order to catch the middleman and mastermind, though, the police put five credit card numbers into the memory of the skimmer that were provided by the Secret Service and let the waiter transfer the device back through the chain of bad guys. The Secret Service got the five credit cards/credit card numbers from two legitimate banks that issue said numbers strictly for use in fraud investigations. The five numbers in question are capable of completing a transaction if used but are all kept solely in the possession of SS agents. However, only one of the five cards has a real cardholder's name printed on the card, the cardholder being herself an SS agent. The remaining four cards have fictitious names printed on the outside. When the police arrested the mastermind in his car shortly after the middleman transferred the skimmer to him, they obviously wanted to charge him with POSSESSING credit card numbers with intent to use them. QUESTION - didn't the secret service agents as 'cardholders' CONSENT to the mastermind possessing the card numbers since they knew from the waiter that the skimmer would end up with the mastermind when it did ?
Posts: 1 | Location: Richmond, Texas, USA | Registered: March 20, 2008
