Chris Landers reports:
Bill Wall is a large man with close-cropped hair and the bearing of a military man, which he is–a major in the Army’s 729th Brigade Support Battalion. His wife Deborah is tiny, blond, and full of an energy that belies the fact that for more than 10 years she has been suffering from a disease that attacks her kidneys.
In 2004, her illness became bad enough that her husband was sent home early from deployment in Afghanistan, and in October 2005, when she was hospitalized at Johns Hopkins for a kidney transplant, he spent a month by her hospital bed, letting the mail pile up at their Perryville home.
Upon her release, the Walls found that one of the things in their stack of mail was a notice from Chase, the credit-card bank, congratulating them on moving to a new house–something they hadn’t done.
The Walls’ response to that notice eventually led to a three year, multi-agency law-enforcement operation, which uncovered half a million dollars in fraud, and the indictment, last month, of a Hopkins employee and another Baltimore woman. Prosecutors claim the two worked together to steal information from patients and used it to open fake credit-card accounts.
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