Two are sentenced in credit-card theft

Two Baltimore men won't be able to pretend to be someone else in a prison cell.

Devin Keith Weller, 22, and Christopher Robert Bacco, 24, were each sentenced yesterday to more than four years in federal prison for using other people's stolen credit-card numbers for a buying spree that ended in Henrico County.

U.S. District Court Judge James R. Spencer handed down prison sentences of 55 months for Weller and 53 months for Bacco. Both had pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and possession of equipment that they used to make fake credit cards with stolen account numbers.

The sentences were the latest fruit of a crackdown on identity theft by federal law-enforcement agencies working closely with state and local authorities.

Weller and Bacco were arrested by Henrico police in mid-2005, but the county transferred the case to federal authorities for prosecution because the elaborate criminal scheme was international in scope and crossed multiple jurisdictional boundaries. The FBI investigated, along with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Henrico police.

The men had used an Internet Web site to contact a European vendor of stolen credit-card account numbers, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. They purchased 150 stolen account numbers and downloaded them into a laptop computer.

They used a device to encode the numbers on plastic credit cards, which they had purchased from another Internet vendor. They matched the names on the phony credit cards with fake identification numbers from a third Internet dealer.

In June 2005, Weller and Bacco used the fake credit cards and IDs on a buying spree that began in Baltimore, continued along Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia and ended with their arrest at a Target store in Glen Allen.

The men purchased computer and electronic gaming equipment from Target stores with the aim of reselling it on the Internet through eBay.

Henrico police seized thousands of dollars worth of stolen electronic equipment, which was returned to the Target chain. - Michael Martz