By Joe Valiquette
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — An identity theft ring, which included two employees from the Department of Motor Vehicles, allegedly sold more than 200 driver's licenses, learner's permits and identification cards for more than $1 million, prosecutors said Tuesday.
New York State DMV employees Glenda Hinton, 54, and Robin Jones-Woodson, 42, as well as the fraud ring's alleged leader, Wilch Dewalt, 52, all face at least 30 years in prison if convicted on charges of identity theft, bribery, and conspiracy, according to US Attorney Preet Bharara.
Other members of the seven-person ring sold stolen personal identification information to Dewalt or directed customers to him, prosecutors said.
Hinton is assigned to the Harlem DMV office and Jones-Woodson is assigned to the Yonkers DMV office, Bharara said.
Among customers who allegedly received DMV documents from this ring were an individual featured on the television show "America's Most Wanted" for his alleged involvement in a drug trafficking and money laundering organization, a convicted sex offender and, an individual on supervised release after serving 70 months in prison for narcotics crimes, according to prosecutors.
One customer was actually an undercover officer posing as a man on the US government's "no-fly" list who told Dewalt he was on the list and wanted a fraudulent driver's license to enable him to travel to Canada from where he could then fly to Pakistan, prosecutors said.
Dewalt acted as a broker who served as a one-stop shop for fraudulent identification documents in return for fees ranging from $7,000 to $10,000, according to court documents.
Each customer provided the fee and a photograph. Dewalt then allegedly provided a "package" of identification documents including birth certificates, Social Security cards, pay stubs and bank cards, some genuine and some fraudulent, that they then used to obtain a DMV document in a stolen identity.
After Dewalt obtained a stolen identity for a customer, he would contact Hinton in the Harlem DMV office where she would check a non-public DMV database to determine if DMV had already issued identification documents in the stolen identity, court papers said.
Dewalt would then contact Jones-Woodson in the Yonkers DMV office to arrange a time when he could bring the customer to the office and have Jones-Woodson process the application.
New York State has taken steps to help prevent this kind of fraud in the future.
"On February 3, 2010, we implemented a statewide program that compares the digital photos of license applicants to all other DMV customer photos," said David Swarts, the Commissioner of NYS-DMV. "The software helps to identify any attempt to obtain a second or third license, or assume the identity of someone already in our system."
