A South Carolina man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing personal information from victims' mailboxes and using it to withdraw thousands of dollars from their bank accounts, Atlanta police said Friday.
Matthew Robert Brown was arrested in July 2019 and pleaded guilty last week, authorities said.
The investigation into Brown began in July 2018 when Regions Bank told investigators a man was using “stolen information to do account takeovers," Atlanta police said in a news release. The bank told detectives nearly $63,000 was stolen.
“Regions Bank provided photos of the suspect completing transactions at a branch while driving a black BMW,” police said in the release.
Investigators linked the car to Brown and realized he had been arrested previously by the Georgia State Patrol. During that arrest, troopers discovered Brown had several fake South Carolina driver’s licenses and stolen checks. One of those driver’s licenses had a fraud victim’s name on it.
About that time, another woman reported that a man driving a U-Haul truck had been stealing her mail, police said. She told investigators he used her information to take over her SunTrust account and steal about $40,000, authorities said.
Brown was captured after a victim in Sandy Springs gave police a surveillance footage of him taking a package from their front door, authorities said. Police later spotted his vehicle with the help of a license plate-reader.
During a search of his car, authorities said they found eight credit cards that didn’t belong to him, 17 pieces of mail with assorted names and drugs. Police also searched his home, finding hundreds of pieces of mail with various names that didn’t belong to him, AJC.com previously reported.
Brown was arrested in July 2019, and faced 34 charges for multiple thefts and fraudulent credit card purchases, police said. He pleaded guilty last week and was sentenced to 20 years with 15 to serve behind bars.
“White-collar criminals are in every community,” Atlanta police said in a Facebook post. “It is imperative that people routinely monitor their bank account activity and their mail delivery. The quicker you can detect a loss to your accounts and report the crime, the sooner investigators can go to work to search for the suspect and stop the criminal from stealing more from you.”
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