A young Arizona identity thief is the first person in the U.S. to be found guilty of federal racketeering charges for facilitating his crimes over a website.
David Ray Camez, 22, was convicted by a Las Vegas jury Friday under the federal Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act. The verdict followed a three-week trial pushed by local prosecutors and a Justice Department attorney who flew in from Washington for the case.
"They steamrolled us," says defense attorney Chris Rasmussen. "The jury was back in a couple hours."
The government’s win has implications for users of websites like the relaunched Silk Road drug site, file sharing services, or any online forum that’s primarily used for illegal purposes. Minor scofflaws using such a site could, under the RICO model, be punished with the same severity as the worst offender.
Camez was already serving a seven-year state term for fraud when the feds charged him again under RICO. The key question facing the jurors wasn't whether Camez was a crook, which the defense conceded, but whether the website on which he did business amounted to an organized criminal enterprise comparable, as a legal matter, to the Mafia or a Los Angeles street gang.
The jury found that it was, and convicted Camez of racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering. The verdict means that Camez, a low-level crook with few assets, will be legally culpable for every crime committed by all 7,900 users of Carder.su, the identify theft forum where he bought stolen credit card information and counterfeiting equipment for use in his crimes. By the government's estimate, that's $50.5 million in losses, worth about 20 years in prison.
The government's win has implications for users of websites like the relaunched Silk Road drug site, file sharing services, or any online forum that's primarily used for illegal purposes. Minor scofflaws using such a site could, under the RICO model, be punished with the same severity as the worst offender.
Carder.su was essentially a criminal eBay, in the mold of earlier carder forums like Carder Planet and Shadowcrew. Carefully screened “vendors” sold a wealth of products: counterfeiting gear, stolen identify information, skimmed or stolen credit card magstripe data, hacker tools, botnets for rent, and online banking credentials. Forum administrations and moderators kept the system purring, and ordinary members like Camez could post reviews of the products they’d bought.
An undercover Secret Service agent infiltrated Carder.su by selling fake IDs on the site under the nickname "Celtic." The four-year operation put high-quality fake IDs -- most of them manufactured by the Nevada DMV -- in the hands of 100 criminals around the world, while the government gathered evidence for four federal grand jury indictments against 55 defendants in 10 countries.
Camez first fell into the trap in May of 2009, when he paid “Celtic” $330 to make him a fake Arizona driver’s license under an alias.
Roman Zolotarev and two other alleged site ringleaders are among those indicted, but they live safely out of reach in Russia. "They never intended to get the main guys," says Rasmussen. "They’re only going to get the college kids that came in, and guys like Camez.”
