A 28-year-old waitress who pleaded guilty to stealing the credit card numbers of about 30 M&S Grill customers in the District is now working as a cashier at a Cosi in Arlington.
Simone Folk was scheduled to be sentenced Friday. The single mother of two was fired from M&S Grill in March after the restaurant learned of her role in a large-scale credit card skimming scheme involving serving staff at Washington-area restaurants. The three leaders of the scheme, all of whom have pleaded guilty, paid the waiters and waitresses $20 for each credit card number and then ran up a $750,000 tab at stores like Gucci and Barney’s of New York.
Folk obtained about $560 for running customer’s cards through a skimming device, her attorney said in court records. The ringleaders charged $137,542 on the cards stolen by Folk.
Now, her attorney wrote, Folk is earning $292 a week as a cashier at the Cosi at 2050 Wilson Blvd., across from the Court House Metro station.
“She doesn’t look like a criminal,” her boss, Robert Bates, told The Examiner. Bates said Folk was completely honest about her criminal past when she applied for the job. When asked if her working a cash register for Cosi is putting his customers at risk, he said he decided to hire her because “people make mistakes in life. … Who am I to say she doesn’t deserve a second chance?”
Bates said Folk’s work has been exemplary. “I’m thinking about promoting her,” he said.
In a letter to a judge pleading for a light sentence, Bates wrote Folk “is always smiling and greeting customers, she even knows a few of them by name.”
Folk is a high school dropout who has never had a run-in with the law until she started swiping credit card numbers, her attorney wrote. She moved to the Washington-area from New York with her children — ages 11 and 6 — to be closer to her mother. She receives food stamps and lives with her boyfriend.
In July 2008, Folk was introduced to Joseph Artemus Bush III by a co-worker who, according to her attorney, was already participating in the scheme. Bush gave Folk the skimming device to record the credit card information and paid her the $20 for each number .
Bush pleaded guilty in May to being a ringleader in the scheme.
