Two men pleaded guilty to a scam that lowered the bills of 5,790 Comcast customers in Pennsylvania by a total of $2.4 million. They now face prison time and will have to pay their ill-gotten wealth back to Comcast.
30-year-old Richard Justin Spraggins of Philadelphia pleaded guilty in February and was “ordered to make $66,825 in restitution and serve an 11- to 23-month sentence,” the Times-Herald of Norristown wrote at the time.
Scaggins was described as the second-in-command of the operation. The accused ringleader, 30-year-old Alston Buchanan, pleaded guilty last week. “Buchanan faces up to 57½ to 115 years in prison, although Buchanan will likely serve a lesser sentence than the maximum,” the newspaper wrote.
There is no agreed-upon sentence—the judge will decide how long Buchanan will spend in prison and how much he’ll have to pay back. “Comcast lost $2.4 million and it will be up to the judge to see how much the defendant will be required to pay back," prosecutor Jeremy Lupo said.
Comcast customers saved an average of $414 in exchange for paying the defendants $75 to $150. “According to the affidavit of probable cause, Buchanan bought the login identification from a Comcast employee and was able to login to the system remotely and change the accounts to lower monthly bills,” the Times-Herald wrote. According to another Times-Herald article, Buchanan “worked as a dispatcher for Comcast in from May 2007 to March 2008 and was familiar with the company’s billing system.”
Tipped off by a suspicious customer, Comcast reported the scam to police in April 2012 after it had been going on for a year. “Investigators were able to make contact with someone known as ‘Nick’ who told them to deposit money into a bank account. The bank account was Buchanan’s,” the newspaper wrote. Police searched Buchanan’s apartment and found ledgers filled with customer information, along with $100,000 in cash.
UPDATE: In response to questions from Ars, Comcast said that it has “enhanced our audit/review process to help identify and prevent this type of activity in the future.”
Customers were not charged retroactively for the discounted amounts, but their bills were “corrected on a moving-forward basis.”
Lupo said in a court hearing last year that “all customers ended up having to pay more money to make up for the loss.”
So Comcast are the scammers, and the scammers are the wrongly accused Robin Hoods…
Sigh.
lol suspicious customer. This is like those whiny girls that rat out the hot teacher having sex with their male classmates.
Hotobu
April 22, 2014, 3:35am
4
<Obligatory one of these guys will serve more time than some murderers, rapists, and child molesters comment>
Suspicious customer, eh… Sounds like someone couldn’t play the game and decided to take the ball and go home.
https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/6559923712/h34BD80B4/
DukeC
April 22, 2014, 3:43am
6
Ugh. This was a fucking good thing for everyone involved (Except Comcast, but fuck Comcast and their fucking monopoly/buyouts in some areas, thus getting to charge for whatever they fucking want).
This is why nobody likes snitches.
Fuck the suspicious customer for ruining everything for everyone.
DukeC:
Ugh. This was a fucking good thing for everyone involved (Except Comcast, but fuck Comcast and their fucking monopoly/buyouts in some areas, thus getting to charge for whatever they fucking want).
This is why nobody likes snitches.
It’s a US endorsed monopoly, as they are given the rights to build those lines using taxpayer money over private property, but then get to have ownership of those lines too.
Either the government needs to start providing these services (along with health care, education, etc.) or they need to just get completely out of in any way being involved with them at all, and force these companies to pay for things themselves.
comcast charging niggas 400 bucks for even a lifetime sub should be a criminal offence. Also had to lol at the 100 year prison sentence for scratching the balls of a revenue which is in the tens of billions per quarter. Capitalism baby fuck yea!
FOBio
April 22, 2014, 8:25am
10
I’d be pretty suspicious too.
What type of information? Could they have used this for ID theft?
Interesting question…
more than likely account numbers and names. Well thats why this shit never works, someone always gets greedy/jelly and snitches. this is why you insulate your self from direct involvement.
LMAO who the hell snitched.
