Woman Receives 1 Year in ID Theft

A key player in a Ventura County identity theft ring will spend the next year in jail as part of a plea agreement, authorities said Thursday.

Nearly 800 people, including a federal judge in Santa Barbara, had credit cards, bank account numbers or Social Security numbers stolen from home mailboxes or had receipts taken from a Ventura hotel, according to law enforcement officials.

The information was allegedly stolen over a period of months ending in June, officials said.

Donna Mendoza, 35, of Oxnard was sentenced Wednesday to a year in jail and placed on three years’ probation. Mendoza, who pleaded guilty to multiple fraud counts in August, was also barred from carrying blank checks or opening a checking account during her probation, authorities said.

A second defendant, Trever Ziese, 30, of Oxnard faces an Oct. 16 trial, officials said.

Mendoza and Ziese are accused of masterminding a traveling identity theft operation that had briefly set up shop in a Camarillo motel in June and targeted Oxnard residents, said Sgt. Patrick MacAuley of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. The duo had previously operated out of Santa Barbara, said Howard Wise, one of two prosecutors assigned to the district attorney’s Computer Crimes Unit.

Sheriff’s deputies inadvertently learned of the Mendoza and Ziese operation in Oxnard, he said.

Deputies answering an unrelated call at the motel on June 7 arrived to see Mendoza and Ziese running from their room, MacAuley said. Deputies chased them briefly and later obtained a counterfeit check from a car they were using, authorities said.

“We pretty much caught them right as they got started. The loss could have been tremendous,” MacAuley said. “They ruined a lot of people’s lives and it takes a lot of time to clean up.”

Investigators uncovered the operation in a room at the Comfort Inn in Camarillo, Wise said. Along with computers and other electronic equipment, there was a book of counterfeit checks emblazoned with swastikas and other designs. Detectives said they also found several stolen driver’s licenses, specialized software and other equipment designed to create false identification cards.

After allegedly pilfering both locked and unlocked mailboxes in south Oxnard and the Mandalay Beach area, authorities said, the suspects used the names of residents to order credit and gasoline cards.

One of the Oxnard residents was a federal judge, whom authorities declined to identify.

Investigators said the suspects used a stolen postal key to gain access to mailboxes.