DA Vance announced the sentencing of Ricky Marech to 3 ½-to-7 years in state prison for using stolen credit card information from five victims to purchase more than $18,000 worth of luxury items. The defendant placed the goods on hold at high-end stores in Manhattan, and then called the stores to purchase those items with stolen credit card information. On April 16, 2013, Marech pleaded guilty to Identity Theft in the First and Second Degrees and Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in the Fourth Degree.
News from the DA's Office
New York state's legislators must do more to strengthen the state's archaic fraud laws if prosecutors are to keep up with the evolving nature of white-collar crime, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said on Monday.
Vance, president of the state's district attorneys association, said New York's financial crime laws were hopelessly outdated, even as their federal equivalents have been frequently revised by congressional legislation in the wake of massive scandals like the savings and loan cases, the Enron Corp collapse and the housing market crisis.
"I believed when I took office we were not mining cases and the massive amounts of relevant data they represent as well as we could for information that could be used proactively, to identify pockets of violent crime in neighborhoods and incapacitate those people who are driving it. And, although mining these cases was a great beginning, it was not enough: we also needed to get to know our neighborhoods and their individual crime problems by listening to community residents and keeping in close touch with the NYPD officers responsible for patrolling those communities.
In short, we knew that our prosecutive strategies could no longer be driven only by the four corners of a given case file. We had to do better."
It began with a simple offer from a stranger on a Manhattan sidewalk, a promise to introduce a woman who appeared to be carrying a heavy emotional load to someone with spiritual powers. From that introduction, in July 2011, the emotions and stakes escalated, with visions of the woman’s dead relatives crying, promises to cure her father’s cancer, and, ultimately, the need to cleanse evil spirits from vast sums of the woman’s cash. By August 2012, the woman had turned over $600,000 for cleansing, and the fortune teller, Janet Miller, had disappeared.
DA Vance announced the guilty plea of Dmitry Epelboym for defrauding insurance companies and falsely claiming to maintain an office in Manhattan in order to benefit from higher billing rates for dental work the defendant was performing in Brooklyn. The defendant pleaded guilty to the top charge in the indictment, Grand Larceny in the Second Degree, as well as Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree, and is expected to be sentenced on July 17, 2013.
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