Life requires a lot of inherent trust. We have to provide credit-card and personal information to both middle people and companies in order to buy things, open accounts or verify our identities, trusting it won’t be misused on any step of the ladder. But that seems to be exactly what happened to one car buyer in Arizona.
The Arizona Department of Transportation, as reported by the Arizona Daily Sun, said in a press release Tuesday that detectives had caught a man suspected of buying a 2007 Chevrolet Corvette with customer information stolen from the car dealership he worked at last March. He was arrested more than a year later on July 29 when local authorities caught him in New Mexico, where he had fled to after people began finding out about the alleged theft.
He was working at another dealership at the time, the press release said.
The Arizona DOT said the man, identified as Randall Cepi, 31, was working at a Nissan dealership last year when he allegedly stole the personal information of a customer who bought a pickup truck there. The information was used about a week later to take out a loan on a Corvette from a Flagstaff dealership, where the press release said Cepi “arranged to have the victim’s signature forged on the dealership and loan documents.”
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The woman whose identity was used for the Corvette began to get insurance and loan information for a car she didn’t buy a few weeks later, the release said, and filed a complaint with the Arizona DOT’s Office of Inspector General. The news reached the dealership in Flagstaff, the release said, which called Cepi trying to get the car back. Instead, Cepi apparently dropped the car at the dealership he worked at and took off.
Cepi was working at another dealership in Gallup, New Mexico when authorities caught him more than a year after the deal unfolded, the press release said. He’s now on his way back to Arizona, preparing to face charges of fraud schemes and forgery, theft of means of transportation and taking someone’s identity—all for a C6 Corvette whose specs we may never know.
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But people want what they want, and if they have another poor soul’s personal information to purchase it with—and lack any semblance of morality, you know—they just might get it.
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