At the height of the conspiracy, three Charlottesville, Virginia residents were able to create identification documents for the states of Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Alan McNeil Jones, 31, Kelly Erin McPhee, 31 and Mark Guerin Bernardo, 34, are accused of producing tens of thousands of fake driver’s licenses and shipping them across the country. They pleaded guilty Wednesday morning to one count of conspiracy to commit identification document fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.
The three defendants admitted to conspiring to create high-quality false identification documents out of the home they shared in Charlottesville. The conspiracy, which began in 2010 and operated under the name Novel Designs, produced and sold more than 25,000 false identification documents, primarily to college students, throughout the nation.
As part of the scheme, Jones paid commissions to students at the University of Virginia and elsewhere to refer his service to other students interested in obtaining fake IDs. He also outsourced some of the manufacturing work to companies in Bangladesh and China.
While Novel Designs was in operation, Jones, McPhee and Bernardo produced approximately 25,000 false driver’s licenses charging anywhere from $75 to $125 per license. The three earned more than $3 million from customers. To date, more than $2 million has been seized by law enforcement.
At sentencing, each defendant faces a maximum possible penalty of up to 15 years in federal prison on the conspiracy charge and a mandatory additional two-year sentence on the aggravated identify theft charge.