unless there is a machine looking at them, it could be a picture of 0bama, binLaudin or Bill Clinton on there, NOBODY looks at the hologram so a cheap 2cent one would prolly work as good as anything...
Posted on 06/17/2010 5:08:39 PM PDT by csvset
NORFOLK
A Virginia Beach man faces an 18-count federal indictment charging him with trying to smuggle hundreds of credit card holograms into the country from the Middle East.
Craig Steven Reynolds, 26, was arraigned Wednesday in U.S. District Court. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and a magistrate judge set an Aug. 17 trial date.
Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Reynolds on April 19 when he tried to retrieve a package containing the holograms, which had arrived from the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, according to a court affidavit filed by the arresting agent.
Reynolds apparently realized the move would be risky: "I knew I should have waited a week to pick it up," he told ICE agent Adriana Mirarchi, according to the affidavit.
Reynolds has been in jail since then.
Holograms can be used as a security device placed on credit and debit cards to prevent duplication.
A Customs and Border Protection officer, conducting routine mail checks at a Federal Express facility in Memphis, opened an envelope addressed to "Paul Jones" in Virginia Beach and discovered 504 counterfeit holograms on 12 sheets of paper. The border protection agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The officer sent the envelope on to its destination at a UPS store on Great Neck Road in the Beach, where Reynolds picked it up using a false identification in the name of Paul Jones, according to Mirarchi's affidavit.
Reynolds told Mirarchi that he purchased the holograms over the Internet from someone in Pakistan for an unidentified sum of money and planned to fabricate Visa cards, the affidavit says,
Further investigation by ICE agents revealed that Reynolds had already produced a number of phony credit cards and used them to obtain cash and purchase an unidentified amount of merchandise, including a laptop computer, according to an indictment handed up by a federal grand jury on June 10.
The indictment says Reynolds created driver's licenses, Navy identification cards, and credit and debit cards in both real and fabricated names.
As a result of the alleged fraud, federal authorities said in a court filing that they are seeking to take from Reynolds a 2003 Jaguar sedan, seven iPods, four cameras, five video game consoles, a laptop and a GPS system.
Reynolds' attorney and the prosecutor in the case declined to comment or provide further details this week.
Tim McGlone, (757) 446-2343, tim.mcglone@pilotonline.com
Oh, credit card holograms. I was thinking those hologram ghost heads at Disney’s Haunted Mansion.
unless there is a machine looking at them, it could be a picture of 0bama, binLaudin or Bill Clinton on there, NOBODY looks at the hologram so a cheap 2cent one would prolly work as good as anything...
Yeah, me too. I thought he got a bunch of those National Geographic covers with a skull on them... lol
Smuggling holograms, hey? Man, I’m impressed! I wonder what kind of container you smuggle holograms in. Maybe a supercooled magnetic ionic anti-matter diffraction field-stabilized vacuum thermos bottle or something like that?
Did any of the holograms project the Death Star blueprints????
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