This is the bedroom area of a home where a methamphetamine addict was living. The entire house was like this.
Posted on 07/15/2005 11:16:50 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
A loosely knit group of thieves have been driving through subdivisions and business parks in several North Georgia counties in recent months, authorities say, stealing mail and identities to obtain money and drugs.
But they were tripped up when they grabbed a laptop computer during a sting in Lumpkin County a few weeks ago, and that's when the roundup of suspects began in earnest. Federal, state and local authorities are now working to unravel the tangled network.
No fewer than 20 members of what authorities call the "Mailbox Meth Gang" in Forsyth, Lumpkin and Dawson counties have been arrested and charged with fraud, identity theft and methamphetamine-related offenses. More arrests are expected, said Forsyth County Sheriff's Investigator Jeff Roe. Eleven of the arrests were made in Forsyth in the past two weeks.
A computer seized in a raid last month in Lumpkin County yielded 65,000 credit card numbers. The U.S. Secret Service has confirmed that 14,000 belong to real people, according a Lumpkin County news release.
Victims have been traced to Gwinnett, Cherokee and Hall counties and to parts of North Carolina, California and Texas.
The computer also contained several reproducible samples of driver's licenses for a number of states. Having fake identification could facilitate cashing bogus checks.
Several cases will be presented to the U.S. attorney's office in Atlanta next week, Forsyth County sheriff's detectives said.
Investigators still don't know how big or how organized the network is, said Forsyth Sheriff's Capt. Mark Hoffman.
Thus far, authorities believe members of the group functioned independently or in small clusters, although many apparently knew one another and sometimes worked together, said Lumpkin County Sheriff's Capt. Jason Stover. Many of the accused are native North Georgians who are hooked on methamphetamine and are believed to have stolen credit cards and checks to support their drug habit, Stover said.
The gang apparently had two branches, one that altered and forged checks and one that focused on credit card theft.
Some members of the group were "runners," who would troll subdivisions looking for raised red flags on mailboxes — police call them "steal me" signs — or look into mailboxes after mail carriers had passed through, Roe said. They would steal mail, looking for checks, bank statements and preapproved credit card applications.
Some of the checks were altered to make them worth more money and to make them payable to the thieves, police said. With check-writing software, the thieves also forged checks using personal information gleaned from the stolen mail.
The ring frequently used Internet hookups at motels to order goods using stolen credit cards, said Forsyth County Sheriff's Detective Charlie Adams. They had the items delivered to vacant houses.
The suspects have led nomadic lives driven by methamphetamine. They often bought new clothes, discarded them when they got dirty, then bought new ones, Roe said. Many are essentially homeless, living in an endless succession of motel rooms.
"They can go through a lot of money just in meth in a weekend," Roe said.
In mid-June, Lumpkin County businesses reported a rash of counterfeit money being passed, said Stover, the Lumpkin sheriff's captain. Secret Service officers were brought in, and on June 21 they recovered the laptop computer.
Rita Whitley of Cumming and her boyfriend, Paul Weisner, were arrested in June in a parking lot in an undercover sting, Stover said. She was charged with identity theft and possession of methamphetamine, and Weisner was charged with obstruction and possession of a firearm by a felon.
They need to crack down hard on people who do this.
Meth abuse is a self-correcting problem. If the idiots don't blow themselves to smithereens cooking off a batch, they drastically shorten their lives using it. Too bad it doesn't work faster, though.
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