Mary Shenk reports:
Patricia Castor of Mahomet fought back tears as she told a judge how her late mother lived in fear after her wallet was stolen by an employee of an Urbana hospital where she was a patient.
[…]
The wallet and identity thief was Karen Dooley, 30, of Champaign, a “transporter” for Provena Covenant Medical Center whose job was to move patients around the hospital. Castor’s mother was just one of many elderly hospital patients victimized by Dooley, who had access to their records.
On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Michael McCuskey sentenced Dooley to eight years in federal prison, the maximum she could have received under federal sentencing guidelines. She also was ordered to pay just over $20,000 in restitution.
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The identity theft allegations stemmed from a sophisticated scheme she had for stealing names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers, mostly from people she had contact with at Covenant in 2007 and 2008.
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More shocking to the veteran white-collar crime detective was a lockbox he found containing scraps of paper with names and personal identifiers of Covenant patients, as well as a composition book in which Dooley kept copious notes on what accounts had been opened in different names.
Kelly said he found at least 100 different names in Dooley’s home, including a credit card bill belonging to a surgeon who received his personal mail at Covenant and an application from a woman who wanted to volunteer at the hospital.
Kelly also learned that Dooley had used Castor’s mother’s credit card to pay for access to an Internet search site that gave her personal information on other people who apparently weren’t hospital patients
Read more in the News-Gazette.