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Sentencing – fraud — number of victims

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//December 27, 2011//

Sentencing – fraud — number of victims

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//December 27, 2011//

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Criminal

Sentencing – fraud — number of victims

In calculating the number of victims in a credit card fraud scheme, the district court properly counted every person whose credit card information was taken, even if they suffered no monetary loss.

“In amending the application note to § 2B1.1, the Commission sought to account for the impact identity theft type crimes have on cardholders who may not have actually lost money. The Commission explained that such an individual ‘even if fully reimbursed, must often spend significant time resolving credit problems and related issues, and such lost time may not be adequately accounted for in the loss calculations under the guidelines.’ U.S.S.G. app. C supp., Amend. 726 (2009). This explanation undoubtedly describes the cardholder victims here. Despite this, Sandoval insists that the government failed to present evidence that the cardholders were inconvenienced by her fraud. From this she posits that the revised guideline is inapplicable to her crime, and that the district court should have thus disregarded it on policy grounds. She also cites a number of cases predating the revised definition to support her position that a victim must occasion financial loss or some quantifiable inconvenience. For obvious reasons, the cases predating the change are inapplicable here. And we reject, as the district court did, Sandoval’s assertion that her victims were not sufficiently inconvenienced by the process of replacing the cards that were compromised by her fraud.”

Affirmed.

10-1219, 10-1338 & 10-1607 U.S. v. Sandoval

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Coar, J., Rovner, J.

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