Three former Verizon store employees accused of identity theft opened accounts and bought phones with information obtained from a local car dealership, Tuscaloosa police said.
The women were arrested this week after an investigation that went on for longer than a year.
Investigators believe that Keenya Martin, Christi Jones and Chemeria Smith, all 27 years old, obtained victims’ personal details from a group of men that bought the information from a Locklear Dodge sales associate. Police believe the women used that information to create false accounts and obtain phones that they sold back to those men.
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The men had not been charged as of Wednesday. A warrant has been issued for the former Locklear employee, but he hasn’t yet been arrested.
The investigation began when the director of sales for Wireless Advantage in Essex Square Marketplace contacted Northport police in January 2016, according to court documents filed this week. The sales director had conducted his own investigation and turned the results over to criminal investigators.
He scheduled a staff meeting at a Tuscaloosa hotel, and invited four Northport officers to attend. The sales director asked the employees to place their phones in a box before he began the meeting.
He then revealed that he was conducting an investigation and had contacted police. During the police interviews that then took place, the women admitted to obtaining personal information from the men.
Northport investigators searched the suspects’ phones and found partial or full identities and began contacting them. They soon realized that many of the victims had recently bought or made inquiries at Locklear Dodge.
The investigators enlisted the help of Tuscaloosa Police Department’s handwriting expert, and compared the list of the stolen personal information with documents from the car dealership. That led them to an employee, who admitted that he had sold the names and information to three men, according to court documents.
As of Wednesday, none of the men had been charged in the case. A warrant was issued last week to charge the Locklear employee with trafficking in stolen identities. The investigators recovered personal information of 267 potential victims on the suspect’s phones, and made contact with 74 of them, according to court records.
Each of the women was charged with trafficking in stolen identities and first-degree theft and has been released on bond.
