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Thieves onboard
Sailors victimize shipmates through identity theft

By Christopher Munsey
Times staff writer



The last thing Lt. Christina Hines expected to deal with when she deployed with the aircraft carrier George Washington in January 2004 was fighting to keep her financial security intact.



But for the entire six-month Persian Gulf deployment, Hines kept getting nasty letters from creditors demanding payment for goods and services she’d never heard of.

It turns out that the culprit responsible for triggering Hines’ ordeal was a thieving shipmate — Personnelman 3rd Class Curtis Phillips, a young sailor working in the ship’s Admin department.

Back in May 2003, Phillips stole, and then handed over, Hines’ name, address and Social Security number to a ring of identity thieves based in Baltimore County, Md.

Choosing officers because he believed they would have better (and more lucrative) credit histories, Phillips accessed sensitive Navy records files, stealing the names and personal data of about 30 officers, including Hines.

Phillips’ Maryland accomplices used Hines’ information to get a bogus — but authentic — Maryland driver’s license, then used that license as identification to apply for various retail store credit cards.

The identity thieves then went on a spending rampage — running up $60,000 in charges at Nordstrom, Home Depot, Ikea and J.C. Penney in Hines’ name.

Hines spent scores of hours completing affidavits disputing the credit card bills, all while trying to keep up with the demands of serving as the ship’s automated data processing officer.

In addition to the hours of lost time and constant worry, she was out $150 in postage by deployment’s end.

Probe began in Maryland

The path to Phillips’ arrest started with an investigation of a Baltimore County identity theft ring by local police in 2003.

Assigned to the George Washington, Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Lee Young worked the case after being contacted by a Baltimore detective. The Baltimore detective called Young after she kept running across victims with two things in common: service in the Navy, and assignment to the George Washington.

Also that year, a clerk at a Target store, suspicious that several people were using fraudulent credit cards, wrote down the license plate of the car they were using. The car came back as registered to Phillips.

Local police followed up with a raid of Phillips’ residence in Baltimore County, and found a personalized BMW key in a bedroom drawer.

The key belonged to a BMW sedan purchased in the name of an officer serving aboard the George Washington — solidifying the link between Phillips and the larger identity theft investigation.

Cmdr. Lewis Booker, the military judge conducting Phillips’ court-martial in Norfolk on Feb. 23, asked Hines what the experience was like.

“Sir, I spent the whole six-month deployment trying to take care of this,” Hines said.

And now, nearly a year later, Hines is still struggling with the damage to her finances.

Hines didn’t have to pay the charges run up in her name, but the constant activity and applications for credit damaged her credit history, she said, driving down her credit score.

“When I purchased a home in January, I had to get someone else to sign the loan for me,” she said.

Hines was one of five officer victims who personally testified at Phillips’ court-martial.

Among them was Lt. Joseph Wigfield, who first learned that his identity had been stolen when investigators from Sears Roebuck’s fraud department called him. But the fraudulent Sears purchases were the least of his worries.

Soon, Wigfield learned he was the “owner” of a $50,000 Cadillac Escalade and $12,000 Suzuki motorcycle. Just like with Lt. Hines, the thieves used Wigfield’s name that was stolen, his Social Security number and date of birth to obtain a driver’s license.

“It was unnerving, to say the least. You don’t know what somebody is going to do with the information,” Wigfield said in court.

What is known is that the thieves racked up more than $300,000 worth of goods in Maryland and Virginia, thanks to the good names and credit of Navy officers.

As of late February, officers on the George Washington whose identities were stolen were still trying to sort out their financial lives, Young said.

“It’s a long and involved process for them,” he said.

For example, the $34,000 BMW Phillips was driving was paid for using Ensign Eric Laettner’s identity.

Other purchases in Laettner’s name included a $14,000 Suzuki motorcycle, an $800 television and a Bally fitness club membership.

Asked in court about the impact of the crime on his life, Laettner wondered who else has all his personal information, and what they might do with it.

“Obviously, if it happened this one time, it can easily happen again,” he said.

At his court-martial, Phillips pleaded guilty to identity theft, unauthorized absence and fraudulent enlistment as part of a plea agreement worked out with Navy prosecutors.

Busted in rate to E-1, he is serving a 47-month prison sentence and must pay a $2,200 fine.

Shortly before he was sentenced, Phillips spoke on his own behalf, reading from a written statement. Toward the end, he choked up, trying to keep from crying. His civilian attorney, David Price, prompted him to keep going.

Phillips described himself as a product of a rough childhood, who had managed to earn a college degree in sociology from Bowie State University while working part-time as a trucker. He enlisted in the Navy in 2000, despite having a history of misdemeanor arrests.

Phillips said he didn’t think the identity theft scheme would involve such big purchases. He didn’t say why he stole from his shipmates.

“I’m here to tell the court that I made a mistake that was huge, and I want to apologize to everyone who was affected by my stupidity,” Phillips said.

Lt. Richard Federico, a Navy judge advocate general who helped prosecute Phillips, urged the military judge to give the sailor a six-year sentence, or one year for every $50,000 worth of fraudulent purchases.

“What did he do? He turned the officers who were stationed with him on the GW into victims,” Federico said.

After the court-martial, Federico said the Navy is serious about finding and punishing sailors who break their trust to safeguard personal information.

“This is a unique crime, and I think the message should be out to the fleet that there are severe consequences if you misuse the information you have access to,” he said.

Identity theft on another carrier

Like Phillips, Disbursing Clerk Third Class (SW) Maria V.G. Ramirez was an enemy within.

Ramirez was assigned to the aircraft carrier Nimitz from December 2001 to July 2003. Her primary job was processing travel orders, giving her access to personnel records.

Her supervisors described her as hard-working and trusted, said NCIS Special Agent Guy Papageorge.

But her husband, David S. Ramirez, clearly was bad news.

Assigned as the onboard Nimitz NCIS agent, Papageorge got a tip from San Diego police in April 2003 that David Ramirez was the leader of a local identity theft ring.

Investigators found a treasure trove of stolen personal information while searching the Ramirez home, some of it linked to Navy people. In addition to names, investigators discovered fraudulent military identification cards.

Acting on what local police discovered, Papageorge searched Maria Ramirez’s berthing and work spaces aboard the Nimitz. He also interviewed her over a four-day period.

“We were finding names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth … she was writing so much stuff down she didn’t know what to do with it,” he said.

Papageorge said Ramirez eventually admitted taking personal information and giving it to her husband.

Her case became part of a larger investigation by a state and federal task force.

Kicked out of the Navy, Ramirez pleaded guilty to check fraud charges in state court in September 2004, and was sentenced to five years in prison.

Papageorge said that although the ring had information from Nimitz sailors stolen by Ramirez, the group apparently didn’t have time to start using the information for credit card fraud before its indictment.

The larger investigation netted convictions against 19 people, including Ramirez’s husband, said Corinne Miesfeld, a deputy district attorney with the San Diego District Attorney’s Office.

The identities of 450 people in the San Diego area were stolen by the ring, and Miesfeld estimated that as many as 25 were Navy sailors. Officials don’t know how many of those 25 ended up being victimized, she said.

Working on the case made Papageorge think about how vulnerable his own identity was to a theft scheme.

The orders moving him to and from the Nimitz required personal information in the form of date of birth, Social Security number and address, he said.

And there are a lot of people with access to that information. While Papageorge is sure that “99 percent” are conscientious about keeping it safe, he worries about those who aren’t.

“There’s a certain vulnerability. … If it gets in the wrong hands, it can be used for bad things,” Papageorge said.

Navy officials would not make administrative ratings training experts available for follow-up interviews about the growing problem of identify theft in their service, but did respond to questions by e-mail.

Sailors working in the administrative ratings of yeoman, personnelman and disbursing clerk are trained to safeguard personal information, wrote Lt. Susan Henson, a spokeswoman for Naval Personnel Development Command.

Those sailors also know that improperly releasing personal information is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Henson wrote, adding that personal information is included in a wide variety of Navy records, and is protected from release by the Privacy Act.

All Navy people learn about preventing identity theft as part of the mandatory Personal Financial Management course, a course all sailors take when they enter the Navy, then continue to learn about annually during general military training, she noted. Along with prevention, Navy people are trained what to do when credit cards, identification or wallets are lost or stolen, Henson wrote.