Identity Thief Sentenced in Manhattan Court

By DANIEL CASSADY & AHAQIR ISHAQ

 A Bronx man was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in state prison on Thursday as a leader of a credit card forging and identity theft ring that ran out of a midtown Hale and Hearty Soup chain, the Manhattan DA’s office said.

Gerald Spears, 40, who pleaded guilty to grand larceny, identity theft, and scheme to defraud last August, and his accomplices used the information from the skimmed credit and debit cards to make $90,000 in fraudulent purchases including designer clothes and electronics, create counterfeit checks, and withdraw cash advances at a casino in Yonkers, prosecutors said.

Iesha Jackson, one of Spears’s accomplices in the scheme, a separately tried co-defendant, and Spears’s girlfriend admitted to skimming as many as 20 credit cards every day between July and September, 2013.

The Manhattan DA’s office says there are as many as 300 identity theft cases reported every month.