A Killing in China Basin - Kirk Russell [48]
But yesterday he’d called Moore asking for a favor. Moore was an industry expert. He booked months in advance and Raveneau asked him to jump Alex Jurika to the front of the line. When the phone rang it was Moore calling back about the cards they’d found in Jurika’s apartment.
‘One of those cards had fifteen thousand four hundred forty-two dollars charged to it from January sixth to July one this year. So that’s more or less twenty-five hundred dollars a month. Alex Jurika or whoever used the card also made regular payments and not all of those were the minimum payment. She paid down a thousand dollars in April and made another sizeable payment later, could have been in June. I’ve got the date here, hold on a second.’
Papers rustled.
‘Sorry about that, it was in June—’
‘This past June?’
‘Yes, and eleven hundred and twelve dollars, enough so it doesn’t look like your typical fraudulent usage. The card belongs to an elderly woman in San Rafael. She didn’t even know she was missing her card. Her daughter figured it out. She told me her mom has twenty cards and hardly ever uses any of them.’
‘What’s the cardholder’s name?’
‘Miriam Shapiro. Do you want her address and the daughter’s phone numbers? I can email them to you. Here, I’ll do that now. Let me know when you get them.’
‘I got ’em.’
‘Where was I?’
‘Miriam Shapiro’s daughter.’
‘That’s right. OK, so I know what the daughter believes, but I don’t really know what the San Rafael Police concluded. It probably makes more sense for you to talk directly with them.’
‘I’ll call them.’
‘Good, and here’s the story. Last summer, old Miriam broke her hip and needed home care. After the home care started, a Visa disappeared from a bundle of a dozen credit cards Miriam had sitting in a desk drawer with a rubber band around them. The credit card company was then contacted with a change of billing address. Whoever made contact had all the requisite info on Miriam Shapiro, so they gathered up more than just a Visa at the house. Bills started mailing to a UPS Store outlet mailbox in San Francisco.’
Raveneau copied down the address.
‘Identity thieves will rent a mailbox or an apartment and pay the rent out of cash advances on cards. They’ll make significant buys, pay the bill in full and then get new credit card offers and a higher line of credit. When it gets high enough they borrow the whole amount and disappear. It takes a certain amount of risk management and patience.’
It was a common enough credit fraud scheme, but Raveneau didn’t comment. He didn’t want to derail Moore’s momentum.
‘The daughter for reasons of her own – she told me she was just curious because her mother never lets her open mail or pay bills – went online and checked her mom’s credit score. When she printed off a credit report she saw all the cards paid except for this Visa with the fifteen grand run up and a new address. She called the credit card company and the police.
‘But here’s where it gets more interesting. An arrest was made of a Latino woman at the UPS Store in San Francisco as she picked up mail, which in this case included eleven other credit card bills, Miriam Shapiro’s and ten others that were also fraudulently obtained. Your department made the arrests but it was a San Rafael Police operation. I have the case file number. I’m emailing it to you, right now.
‘It turned out the Latino woman didn’t speak English and could prove she’d only been in the country for three months. She was actually here legally and there were lots of tears and weeping because she claimed she’d never broken a law in her life and couldn’t understand why anyone would do this to her. All she did was answer an ad in a Hispanic newspaper and get a part-time job to collect mail from a few spots, and