A woman accused of targeting seniors and trying to trick them into giving up their credit card and personal information was convicted Friday.
A DeKalb County jury found Santee Sherise Roberts guilty of racketeering, identity theft, financial transaction fraud and elder exploitation for her part in the so-called “Georgia Powers” scam.
Prosecutors said that over a five-month period in 2009, Roberts, 36, and two others used a pre-paid mobile phone registered to a Georgia Powers to call seniors and take advantage of them.
As a result, the victim’s caller ID would register a name similar to the statewide electrical provider.
Debbie Ogle, the investigator for Georgia Power, told the jury last week that beginning in March 2009, the company began receiving phone calls from customers stating they’d been called from someone claiming to be from the company and threatening to disconnect the customers’ power unless they paid the full, supposedly past-due balance.
“Customers said they got the call … saying the date on the check (they paid their bill with) was wrong and the payment did not go through,” Ogle said. “They were always in alphabetical order.”
Of 194 people who reported being called from the number, Ogle found that more than 70 either gave their credit card or personal information.
In some cases, victims were even told to place their credit cards in their mailboxes to be picked up by someone purported to be from Georgia Power, claiming that the credit card had been compromised by fraudsters.
“She said they had a special senior citizens program at Georgia Power, and they would come pick up a check,” or credit card, said would-be victim Ina Reeves from the witness stand. She said she was called early one Saturday morning.
Reeves, 77, gave the woman on the other end of the phone her credit card information, then called back to Georgia Power after thinking about what she’d done … to no avail.
“No one answered,” she told the court. “It made me feel angry.”
She quickly cancelled her credit card and suffered no loss.
But others did, prosecutors said.
Roberts and her cohorts, Charlene Merkerson and her son Donald Crane used personal information to open credit card accounts in the names of their victims, and would go to the victims’ homes and fish the cards out of the mailboxes, prosecutors said.
Or they would use the actual cards they retrieved to get gift cards, rent hotel rooms, eat out or get cash advances, the indictments claim.
Video footage played in court showed Roberts buying a $100 Quick Trip gift card, some cigarettes and corn dogs with one credit card she’d stolen.
When an assistant manager in the video asked her identification, she pretended to know him.
“I left my ID, but I’m in here all the time, Matt,” Roberts said in the surveillance footage, identifying herself by the first name on the stolen card. “Nobody’s got a name like Edwina.”
In April 2009, she was arrested in a Fulton County hotel room where police found a stolen credit card and a piece of paper with the credit card owner’s social security number, birth date, and phone number listed.
But Roberts faked a medical emergency and escaped police custody when she was placed in an unsecured room at Grady Memorial Hospital.
In August 2009, Roberts and Merkerson were caught trying to take a credit card from a target victim’s mailbox in East Point.
Both pretended to suffer some physical illness when arrested, and although Merkerson got away, Ogle said Georgia Power paid for an off-duty policeman to stand watch outside Roberts’ hotel room.
Merkerson remains at large.
Roberts will be sentenced this week.
She pleaded guilty to running the same scheme in Michigan, and that conviction will weigh on a judge’s sentencing decision.
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