A federal jury on Tuesday found a 37-year-old Atlanta man guilty of bank fraud, credit card fraud and aggravated identity theft in schemes that cost American Express, SunTrust Bank and hundreds of individuals millions of dollars.
Jean-Daniel Perkins was found guilty after a five-day trial in U.S. District Court, Atlanta, according to a news release by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
“This defendant was a predatory fraudster of the worst sort. He bought, sold, and traded in other people's personal information to enrich himself, indifferent to the cost to others,” U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said in the news release.
Perkins, who refused to attend the trial and watched the proceedings by video feed to his courthouse cell, faces maximum sentences of 2 years for aggravated ID theft, 30 years on each of the conspiracy and bank fraud counts and 50 years total on the credit card fraud counts. He also faces total fines of up to $33 million.
His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 7.
From November 2008 through February 2010, Perkins ran several fraud schemes in Atlanta, prosecutors said.
An undercover FBI agent, posing as an employee of a company with financial data, offered to make sensitive data available to Perkins. Perkins gave the agent dozens of counterfeit credit cards and discussed a variety of criminal schemes.
Trial evidence showed that in one scheme, Perkins purchased information such as account numbers from a source in the Ukraine, then encoded phony credit cards with the data and used the cards.
Also, from February 2009 through February 2010, Perkins got hold of internal SunTrust account information and impersonated the account holders, resulting in the money transfers to accounts under his control.
In one instance involving an account held by a local construction company, Perkins impersonated the company’s president, signed up for online banking services from SunTrust, and authorized transfers of more than $3.5 million from the company’s account to Perkins’ own accounts.
SunTrust recovered the transferred funds before Perkins spent it, prosecutors said.
In another scheme, Perkins set up fictitious merchant accounts with American Express.
Using stolen American Express credit card account numbers belonging to hundreds of credit card holders, Perkins then ran credit card transactions through the merchant accounts, resulting in American Express paying millions of dollars to the fictitious merchants.
When Perkins was arrested, authorities recovered hundreds of counterfeit credit cards, digital media connecting the defendant to the fraud schemes, items purchased with counterfeit cards and equipment to produce and encode credit cards, prosecutors said.
The case was investigated by the FBI and Duluth Police Department.
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