MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) - A man who admitted to participating in two separate fraud conspiracies involving hundreds of thousands of dollars will go to prison for almost three years, a federal judge decided Friday.
Sean Donnell White, 30, of Mobile, he pleaded guilty in March 2023 to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. In December of that year, he pleaded guilty to wire fraud.
U.S. District Judge Kristi DuBose sentenced him to a year and eight months in prison on each of the fraud charges in the two cases and ordered they he serve them at the same time. She tacked on an additional year for the identity theft, for a total of two years and eight months.
Defense attorney Brian Dasinger said White has a wife in the Navy and a 4-year-old daughter.
"We're happy with the result," he said. "He's got no prior criminal history. He has taken responsibility for his conduct. ... His behavior before and after these charges has been exemplary."
In the first case, White admitted that he used a so-called arrow key, a device that a postal worker can use to access any mailbox. He admitted that he and others stole mail, searching for checks that they used to produce forged and counterfeit checks that they deposited in banks. The fraud amounted to tens of thousands of dollars, according to court records.
Law enforcement officers arrested White after he led them on a high-speed chase on Nov. 1, 2022, in which he drove through several stop signs and parking lots before heading east on Airport Boulevard. The chase ended in front of a house on Emogene Street, according to his written plea document.
In the second case, White admitted that he obtained more than $200,000 through a "sophisticated" scheme from December 2020 to about March 2022.
According to White's plea agreement in that case, the "Coinbase scam" started with the purchase of stolen identities from dark web marketplaces. He admitted that for each stolen identity, he opened a bank account and an account with Coinbase, an online platform for trading cryptocurrency.
White picked banks that allowed customers to overdraw their accounts by as much as $35,000, according to the plea document. He would withdraw cash up to that limit and deposit the funds in the Coinbase account to make cryptocurrency trades.
If the trades went south, the bank took the loss. If White made money on the trades, he resettled the overdrawn account and then siphoned off the profits into different accounts he controlled, according to the plea agreement.
The plea document cites an example from August 2021. White created a Coinbase account and a PNC Business bank account, along with a PayPal account using the actual name, address, date of birth and Social Security number of a person identified as G.B. White then overdrew the bank account by $35,000 and transferred the money to the Coinbase account in G.B.'s name.
White used that account to buy cryptocurrency, which he then traded. The plea agreement indicates that he made money off of the transaction and transferred $1,000 in August 2021 from the Coinbase account to the PayPal account in the same victim's name. From there, he transferred that money to his own PayPal account and then to his personal bank account at JP Morgan Chase.
White obtained at least $210,000 in fraudulently obtained proceeds, according to the plea agreement.