Ex-Officer, Bank Official Admit Credit Card Scam

A former San Diego police officer and a bank official pleaded guilty Monday to a scheme under which they illegally obtained and used credit cards.

They are Thomas Stark, once with the San Diego Police Department fraud unit and a former Imperial Beach councilman, and Thomas De Haven, who was in charge of processing auto loan applications for Citicorp Savings. They pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court and will be sentenced Dec. 7 by U.S. District Judge Earl B. Gilliam. Each could receive 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Thomas Ferraro said that between July, 1986, and March, 1987, Stark, 43, and De Haven, 34, obtained several credit cards by using the names of people who had applied for car loans at Citicorp. Stark worked as a fraud investigator for First Data Resources, a company that processes credit card applications for small banks throughout the United States. Together, De Haven and Stark defrauded several banks of $34,000, Ferraro said.

Supervisor Notified

The scheme began to unravel in August, when a bank clerk doing a routine address check notified Stark’s supervisor that one of the illegal credit cards was mailed to a condominium next door to where Stark lived in San Diego. Gil Lopez, who was Stark’s supervisor, began an internal investigation and found that Stark and De Haven had obtained 11 credit cards, and 7 of them had been mailed to the condominium next door to Stark’s house.

De Haven lived in the same condominium complex, about three doors away, said Lopez, who works in First Data Resource’s investigations office in Santa Ana.

Lopez said that Stark only used the phony credit cards once, when he purchased $50 worth of perfumed soap bars at a local import store. “I can’t find a motive for his involvement, but he assisted De Haven by manipulating the reports of our investigations into the illegal cards,” Lopez said.

When the illegal cards were discovered, Stark used First Data’s computer to change the addresses that appeared on the report showing where the cards were originally mailed. In some cases, Stark changed the addresses by substituting the real addresses of the persons under whose names the cards were issued. Upon interviewing them, the company’s investigators learned that they never applied for the cards.

Address Changes

Stark and De Haven also attempted to throw investigators off their trail by calling in address changes after receiving the cards. “In each instance, there was a call made to the issuing bank with a new address. When we traced all of these addresses, they were for homes in the San Diego area that had been vacant for some time,” Lopez said.

However, investigators used the original credit card applications to trace the addresses where the cards were mailed. These applications led First Data investigators and agents from the Secret Service and U.S. Postal Service to the condominium next door to where Stark lives.

Stark, who retired with a disability from the Police Department in 1980, went to work for First Data Resources the following year as the company’s only investigator in San Diego.

“He worked for me for five years and I had complete trust in him, “ Lopez said. “For something like this to come up, well, it was a shock to the entire banking community. He had access to all the records of our customer banks in San Diego. He didn’t know he was under investigation until we arrived at his house to arrest him.”

Citicorp officials could not be reached for comment to discuss De Haven’s role in the affair.