Syracuse Man Sentenced to 140 Months for Credit Card Fraud Schemes

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK – Daquan Rice, age 23, of Syracuse, was sentenced today to 140 months in prison, to be followed by a 3-year term of supervised release, in connection with his prior guilty plea to charges involving a years-long credit card cloning operation, announced United States Attorney Grant C. Jaquith; James N. Hendricks, Special Agent in Charge of the of the Albany Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); Postal Inspector in Charge Joseph Cronin; New York State Police Superintendent George P. Beach II; and Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler.  Senior Judge Frederick J. Scullin also ordered Rice to forfeit $82,550.00.

The defendant was sentenced today for two separate federal cases involving illegal credit card activity.  The first, to which he pled guilty on June 1, 2017, involved wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft, based on his role in a scheme that generated tens of thousands of dollars from the use of stolen and counterfeit credit cards.  As part of his guilty plea to those charges, the defendant admitted to the purchase of stolen credit card numbers belonging to hundreds of different victims, frequently from computer hackers located overseas, and the fabrication of cloned credit cards.  Rice further admitted that he used those cloned credit cards to purchase tens of thousands of dollars in merchandise and prepaid gift cards.  The defendant then used those prepaid gift cards to purchase United States Postal money orders, which he converted to cash.  Rice’s and his co-defendants’ criminal conduct spanned from 2014 through 2016 and took place in Syracuse, as well as Texas and Georgia.

Today’s sentence also covered a second federal criminal case to which the defendant pled guilty on May 25, 2018, relating to the defendant’s participation in a counterfeit credit card scheme while he was in jail awaiting sentencing on the initial federal charges.  In that second case, Rice pled guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, and admitted that in August and September 2017, he and a co-defendant acquired stolen credit card numbers, made deposits with those numbers into inmate commissary accounts, and then directed that checks be drawn from those commissary accounts and mailed out to locations in Syracuse, New York.  Rice and his co-defendant made more than $8,600.00 in deposits using the stolen credit card accounts.  Three checks, totaling $550.00, were sent out from the commissary accounts where deposits had been made with the stolen credit cards. However, prison officials froze the accounts and blocked the withdrawal requests before Rice could transfer additional funds.

These cases were investigated by the United States Postal Inspection Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Syracuse Police Department – Gang Violence Task Force, the New York State Police, the Cayuga County Sheriff’s Office, and the Town of Dewitt Police Department, and were prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Commandeur.