A federal judge in Orange County has sentenced a Southern California identity thief to a term of 15 months of incarceration for operating a 2012 scam involving Knott's Berry Farm and Knott's Soak City tickets.
According to an FBI cyber crime unit, Horbert Robert Thursby (a.k.a. “Gotti,” “Prince” and “Thirsty”) and another defendant, Lamarr T. Ramsey, stole Discovery Card data from unsuspecting victims, purchased tickets to the Buena Park theme parks and then used Craigslist to find buyers for discount tickets.
The scam resulted in about $19,000 in profits before suspicious FBI agents answered the ad and found Thursby in a parking lot near the park.
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At this month's sentencing hearing inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney ordered restitution to about 116 victims who noticed the charges on monthly credit card statements.
Carney also compelled Thursby–who was born in 1986–to perform 20 hours of weekly, community service while undergoing supervised probation for three years, a period that begins immediately given the defendant was given a punishment deemed “already served” in pre-sentencing custody.
Though the duo tried to cloak their identities with various Internet decoy strategies, undercover FBI agents easily tracked them to various Long Beach-area computers and addresses.
Ramsey has not been sentenced, though he's admitted guilt.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.