June 17, 2010
-
News: Thief Poses As Law Enforcement Officer
A number of residents of Venice, Florida, thought they were being protected by a law enforcement officer when in actuality, they were contributing to their own credit card and identity theft. There's just no way to know who and who not to trust now a days. When Louis Farra Khan Reed dressed in a policeman uniform, showed up at their doors, he told them he was conducting a credit card and identity theft investigation. What he was really doing was running his own identity theft scam. Reed ran the scam for nearly seven months convincing elderly residents to give him personal information which he used to open credit card accounts up in their names. He then used the accounts to rack up thousands of dollars in fraudulent charges.
Reed who had been arrested and charged with five felony counts in December 2009 for racking up over $21,000 on a stolen credit card, was under surveillance by law enforcement officers when enough evidence was uncovered to arrest him again. After the second arrest, Reed was charged with 14 additional counts relating to identity and credit card fraud. Police were able to track Reed down after receiving a number of complaints from residents who claim they had become the victim of fraud and spoke of a police officer who had recently visited their homes asking for personal information.
Sarasota County authorities said that investigators used the information obtained from a few of the fraud victims which lead them to Reed. They were also able to track an email address that he had used to apply for credit cards to Reed, and say the fraudulent cards were mailed to his home. Police quickly arrested Reed tracing two phones calls that he had made to victims posing as an FBI officer. He has been charged with three counts of criminal use of personal identification, two counts of impersonating a police officer and a misdemeanor count of theft. The authorities are once again reminding all individuals to never give out personal information to anyone over the phone if they did not initiate the call.