The Bonnie and Clyde of credit card fraud

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, July, 1998 by Kristin Davis

Aside from state and local police departments--which sometimes have just a single detective assigned to financial crimes--the U.S. Secret Service and FBI investigate identity theft and related fraud. But they concentrate on fraud rings and big-money cases."The Cullens finally got caught because the Delaware police showed a lot of determination," Andrews says. "Normally, check and credit card fraud is not a high priority for police."

Postscript: The physical chore of cleaning up the mess after the Cullens were led from their rental home in handcuffs fell to Cynthia Miller, their landlady. She gave away some of the furniture and other possessions the chameleon couple had left behind, sold others and tossed out the rest, including--in an act of poetic justice--the Cullens' wedding photos and other artifacts of their true identity.

RELATED ARTICLE: Roger and me

"I FEEL LIKE you're my sister," Roger Cullen said to me the first time we spoke on the phone, nearly 15 months after I began following the case that made him prisoner number 03953-015. I feel like I know him pretty well, too, by the time we meet in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Ky. We sit across a small table, alone except for two guards nearby. It is May Day 1998, and he's been incarcerated here since February, suffering from liver disease. I am his first visitor.

Wearing khaki trousers and a gray sweatshirt, Cullen enters clutching a copy of Kiplinger'sone of several I'd sent him. At the outset, we discuss Ed Peters's remark--in the accompanying story--that he'd like to beat up the guy who stole his identity. Cullen laughs quietly, then catches himself and says, "This isn't something to laugh about."

He bristles at prosecutor Richard Andrews's description of him and his wife as freeloaders. "This wasn't entirely what we depended on for our livelihood," he says. Cullen emphasizes that he and his wife held legitimate jobs throughout the past several years. That seems to ease his conscience. He's animated when he talks about a well-paying sales job he was to begin--as David A. Williams--within days of his arrest. "Isn't it ironic?" he says, claiming he was on the verge of going straight . . . under yet another alias.

I get the impression that Cullen doesn't see himself as a criminal but as someone who got tangled up in benign misconduct that spiraled out of control. "I'm not the type of person I'm living with in this place," he says. "Seventy-five percent of them will be back. I won't."

The false-identity scam first came to him, he says, after he lost his license on a drunk-driving charge. He established a false identity "because I needed a name for a driver's license in order to get legitimate work. From there it proliferated into other things." While he won't elaborate on the record, in the police interview he describes a progression from getting driver's licenses and working under other names to renting homes and opening fraudulent bank and credit card accounts.

Was he surprised at how easy it was? "Yes," he says emphatically.