Site Directory:
Monday, 11 September 2006
Man sentenced for stealing cancer patient’s identity
Nov 7, 2004 - Article pulled from www.24x7updates.com...
Lying in a hospital bed, dying of cancer and weak from massive doses of
chemotherapy, Eric Drew began to
get mail.
But the only well-wishes in these letters were from banks and
credit
card
companies,
thanking him for opening new accounts - accounts he knew nothing about.
After a maddening six months of calling the companies, police, reporters and
collection
agencies,
Drew discovered who had stolen his identity: a technician at the Seattle
Cancer Care Alliance, where he received the first of his two bone marrow
transplants last fall.
The technician, Richard W. Gibson, 42, was sentenced to 16 months in prison
Friday, the first person in the nation sentenced under a new law designed to
protect patients’
privacy, federal prosecutors said.
He also will be required to pay at least $15,000 in restitution, including
reimbursing Drew for the time and money he spent trying to clear his name.
"This court considers your behavior in this case to be some of the most
deplorable I’ve seen in 15 years on the bench," U.S. District Judge Ricardo
Martinez told Gibson.
The sentence was four months longer than prosecutors requested.
Drew, a mortgage banker from Los Gatos, Calif., recently had his second bone-marrow
transplant at the University of Minnesota medical center. He described his ordeal in a statement videotaped
Monday and played in court Friday.
"I felt completely ignored, frustrated and totally violated," he said,
sitting in a hospital bed in his Minneapolis apartment. "Nobody seemed to
empathize or care about this situation whatsoever, and my doctors and family
wanted me to drop it because they were worried about the huge amount of
stress this was placing on me. They were afraid it would actually cause my
impending bone marrow transplant to fail."
Drew, 37, discovered he had leukemia in early 2003 after donating blood,
said his lawyer, Gregory Ursich. He began treatment at Stanford University
Medical Center and was transferred to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance in
September 2003.
Within a few weeks, the mail started. Drew was stunned - he had just closed
all of his credit card accounts before moving to Seattle. He called the
companies and banks about every fraudulent application he learned of, and
urged them not to issue credit. Some went ahead and did it anyway.
"My frustration level grew as more and more application confirmations and
then collection calls started to come in," he said. "Months went by where I
was extremely sick and unable to pursue all the calls and letters regarding
the fraudulent accounts. ...
"From my sickbed, I called the banks who issued the credit and told them of
the fraudulent activity, but most of them refused to stop the accounts
without notarized affidavits. There was no possible way I could obtain these
affidavits from my hospital bed and in my condition with my limited funds. I
was so furious I could not sleep at night."
The identity theft consumed his life and made it impossible for him to
continue to raise money for bone marrow drives, charities and individual
patients. He previously had raised $250,000 for such causes, he said.
When he was well enough to leave the hospital after his transplant in
December 2003, he began visiting the Seattle Police Department, banks and
even the post office, tracking down the letter carrier who delivered to the
address associated with the fraudulent accounts.
Even with the address, he said, he received little help from authorities.
Sometimes, he said, he was so desperate that he unhooked his infusion lines
at night to meet strangers who thought they might have information about the
perpetrator.
Stores admitted that they might have videotapes of the perpetrator. But,
they told him, they weren’t willing to review months of tape to find a few
images.
Finally, Drew got a break. A local television reporter jumped on the story
and within three weeks was able to obtain video of someone making fraudulent
purchases.
Drew was stunned. It was Gibson, who at least once had drawn Drew’s blood.
Gibson was arrested and fired. He pleaded guilty in August to violating the
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which became effective
in April 2003.
"I am very sorry about what I did," Gibson told the judge Friday. "When I
initially started to do this, I wasn’t thinking about that I was going to be
hurting someone. I’ve seen the impact of what I’ve done."
Gibson used about $9,100 of Drew’s credit to buy jewelry, video games, a
barbecue grill - items for himself as well as Christmas presents for his
wife and five children. His lawyer, Paula Deutsch, told the judge he was
under tremendous financial pressure.
The judge didn’t buy it.
"You took advantage of the that position of trust you were in," Martinez
said. "You did so for the most base reason of all: greed."
- Accounts from the BBB
- Accounts in Newsweek
- Victim Still Battling His...
- Identity Theft by Roommate
- Man sentenced for stealing cancer patient’s identity
- A Father's Difficulty
- A Cautionary Tale about Debit Cards...
- She faces unknown future...
- A scheme full of surprises...
- New trend in ID theft...
- Anatomy of an ID theft...