A La Mirada man who ran a fraud ring that stole credit card information from restaurant customers to create counterfeit cards was sentenced Thursday to nearly 15 1/2 years in federal prison.
Russell Jay “Big Dog” Ogden, 45, was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald to pay a share of nearly $486,000 in restitution and serve five years of supervised release following his 185-month prison term.
Ogden was “a charismatic leader” who organized the conspiracy and raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from identity theft victims, the judge said.
In arguing for a 21-year prison term, Assistant U.S. Attorney Justin Rhoades told the court that Ogden was the “creative spark and fuel” for a scheme “based on greed.”
Ogden pleaded guilty last year in downtown Los Angeles to conspiracy and aggravated identity theft charges in connection with the fraud case, and to two drug distribution charges in a separate federal indictment. Ogden faced a mandatory minimum of a dozen years behind bars.
Ogden was among 13 people — most of them linked to street gangs based in La Mirada and Norwalk — charged in 2017 in the bank fraud scam. Prosecutors said Ogden, along with his 43-year-old wife, ran the scheme, which used electronic “skimming” devices to collect information from victims’ credit cards.
Shelly Anne Ogden, who previously pleaded guilty to the conspiracy and identity theft charges, was sentenced in March 2018 to 4 1/2 years behind bars and ordered to pay a share of the restitution.
Members of the scheme encoded the stolen information on counterfeit credit cards and used the phony cards to purchase big-ticket items that were later sold for a profit. Investigators determined that many of the credit cards in the case were skimmed at a restaurant in Huntington Beach.
In total, the fraud ring compromised more than 500 credit cards and caused various financial institutions to suffer losses of about $500,000 when the cards were used across Southern California at department stores such as Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, sporting goods stores and Toys R Us, according to the indictment.