Several diners at the Sharonville Ruby Tuesday restaurant who were waited on by Julian Montgomery in the fall of 2009 gave him – unknown to them – more than a tip.
Montgomery, 31, was a waiter at the restaurant and would steal credit card information from some diners and sell it to others who ran up tens of thousands of dollars in illegal charges.
Josh Jacobs, 33, and a co-worker were visiting a professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph on Nov. 21, 2009. On their trip home to Urbana, where both men work, they stopped to eat at the Ruby Tuesday and were waited on by Montgomery. Jacobs used his credit card to pay for their meals.
That was unfortunate for the waiter for two reasons:
-It was a card Jacobs rarely used.
-Jacobs and his co-worker are police officers in Urbana, 93 miles northeast of Cincinnati, and were in plainclothes that day.
Days later, Jacobs received a call from his credit card company alerting him to unusual activity with that card.
“It caught their attention because … my card number ended up being used up and down (Interstate) 75,” Jacobs said.
He told the credit card company he didn’t buy the several tanks of gasoline or the hundreds of dollars of gift cards at Walgreen’s that were charged to his card.
Being a police officer, Jacobs contacted Sharonville police.
Jacobs told them he’d used that card just once recently – the Sharonville Ruby Tuesday. Police went there and eventually arrested Montgomery.
Montgomery admitted he had a machine that would copy the credit card data when the card was swiped through it, a process called “skimming.”
“He would skim the number and then sell it to some guys in Detroit for cash and drugs,” Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Andy Berghausen said. “What we linked him to was $50,000? in illegal credit card charges.
Montgomery pleaded guilty in December to identity fraud.
“Unfortunately for him,” Jacobs said, “he skimmed a cop’s credit card and a credit card that I’d almost never used.”
Montgomery was sentenced to a Camp Washington locked-down drug rehab program and placed on three years of probation by Common Pleas Court Judge Beth Myers. If he violates his probation, he faces four years in prison.
Article source: http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20110105/NEWS010702/101060317/
Category: Identity Theft Watch
