Guillermo Contreras reports:
The personal information of 17,000 people who stayed at San Antonio hotels has been compromised after someone stole stacks of credit card receipts and redistributed them.
The still mushrooming identity-theft case is thought to be San Antonio’s largest.
“Up to this point, we have recovered 1,500 (receipts), but we’re estimating 17,000 were compromised,” said Mark Bartlett, special agent in charge of U.S. Secret Service in San Antonio, which heads a task force on identity theft made up of several regional law enforcement agencies.
The stolen accounts of hundreds of people already have been used to make fraudulent credit cards, which then were used to make purchases at area retailers, court records show.
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The names of the victimized hotels, which include at least three, were not released by authorities.
A San Antonio Express-News investigation, however, found hundreds of the ID-theft victims were guests of the Emily Morgan Hotel.
Some of the stacks of receipts were stolen from that hotel in fall 2006. The case picked up steam in the past few months after drug investigations turned up some of the stolen items.
Read more on MySanAntonio.com