It’s the stuff of legendary idiocracy…
Identity theft is one of the sketchiest crimes that one person can do to another as it involves one of the most overcomplicated strategies of illegal goods and funds all while being extremely lucrative and very volatile. Unlike some other crimes you're pretty much guaranteed to get caught at some point, most just hope it's after the victim has been drained of their money. Mostly what ends up happening is that the thief uses another person's identity for a little while for small purchases and then eventually moves up to bigger and bigger purchases until they get too cocky and end up getting caught. This is a great example of just that as one man took it upon himself to assume the role of another person in an attempt to purchase himself a practically new American Pony car.
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It all started with one man, Brandon Brouillard, a 29 year old who, on April 7th 2022, pleaded guilty to two counts of bank fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. His first account of identity theft happened in February of 2021, at least in relation to these particular charges, when he wired $108,000 somebody else's bank account with Bank of America to his own. This is a ridiculous amount of money and it's very unclear as to why this didn't immediately get him caught but apparently this worked, at least for a little while. No, the real trouble came when Brandon tried to purchase himself a new automobile.
The muscle car in question was an $83,000 2021 Chevrolet Camaro which he had apparently test-driven in April of 2021 and liked a lot. In fact he liked it so much that he attempted to use a big chunk of that $108,000 to pay for the car. Apparently he hadn't gotten away with the first transfer as well as he thought he did as his account was already frozen by that point. In fact a resident of Arizona went ahead and reported that somebody had fraudulently tried to wire the money from their account. In the meantime Brandon promised the dealership that he would wire the rest of the money and when all was said and done the car along with many other transfers had added up to a whopping $500,000 in illegal funds. Luckily the FBI was quick enough to catch this dude before he was able to spend in the 7 figures range and now he faces 47 months in prison and 5 months of supervised release before he can ever call himself a free man again. People like Brandon Brouillard deserve to have the full book of the law thrown at them for their heinous crimes and hopefully he'll learn a lesson about taking what isn't his and pays the victim back somehow.
