A Manassas man stole nearly $750,000 from financial institutions using Social Security numbers he bought from Chinese temporary workers as they left the U.S. commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, according to court documents.
Jungwook Oh pleaded guilty to mail fraud last year and faces more than five years in prison when he’s sentenced later this week. The 48-year-old was born in South Korea but has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for 30 years.
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When authorities arrested him in June at his house on Navarone Place, according to documents filed in Alexandria’s federal court, they found more than 100 credit and debit cards in the names of more than 30 people in the Honda Pilot he had parked outside.
By then, Oh had run up a $749,000 bill to cover the costs of his alcohol and gambling addictions.
Prosecutors say Oh started the scheme in November 2007 by buying Social Security numbers and Chinese passports from temporary foreign workers as they left the Northern Mariana Islands for home. He would then alter the passports so they displayed his picture. Oh then used the altered passports and the supporting Social Security numbers to obtain identification cards from Illinois.
The Illinois identification cards opened the doors for him to obtain credit and debit cards from 20 financial institutions. He then built up the credit of his alternate identities, often by adding them as authorized users to his own accounts, court documents said. In one case, he ran up a $51,688 bill on a Citibank account, Oh admitted.
The cash was never paid back.
Prosecutors have argued that Oh receive up to five years and three months in prison, but his attorney has said Oh should spend less than five years behind bars, in part because the identifying information he used was no longer important to the people he bought it from. “The [Social Security numbers] were abandoned by, and in most cases apparently sold by, the persons to whom they had been issued,” his attorney wrote.
Either way, Oh’s plea agreement stipulates that he pay back $690,556.
