A Tennessee trucker who posted an eBay auction offering sensitive personal information that Las Vegas casinos kept on high-rolling clients has lost a bid to overturn his four-year prison term and conviction.
Ruling 2-1, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday set aside a nuanced legal argument concerning the defendant's mental state at the time of the 2007 crime.
Jeffrey Greer, 52 years old, was convicted of two counts of extortion and two counts of racketeering in 2008, after the FBI disrupted his plot to extract money from the MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment of Las Vegas.
The trucker was tasked with shipping a load of wired, paper-trash bales to an Alabama recycling center. But about 50 pounds of the trash came loose from the bales, and was accidentally left behind in his truck. That's when Greer's troubles began.
The documents contained records of Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, betting limits and, among other things, betting habits.
The casinos had contracted with Secured Fibers of Nevada to collect these confidential documents and destroy them, according to court documents.
Days after Greer found the jackpot in his truck's cargo area, he contacted Harrah's and the MGM. He informed security officials that he had obtained sensitive information about their clients and said he could access the information via a "hole" in the casinos' computer systems. Eventually, he demanded $250,000 as a consulting fee to "plug" the hole, in addition to a $100,000 bonus for admission into the World Series of Poker.
Greer also set up an eBay auction. The auction displayed a hand grasping a pair of animal testicles with the caption: "A Large Gaming Company's Family Jewels." The auction, according to court records, listed a starting bid of $100,000 and promised "inside business information," the appeals court said.
He was arrested by FBI agents posing as Harrah's security officers during a drop off of $250,000.
Greer was convicted on four of six charges and sentenced to 46 months in prison.
The San Francisco–based appeals court on Thursday dismissed his contention that a Nevada federal judge erroneously instructed the jury that prosecutors were not required to prove Greer "knew that his actions were unlawful."
Extortion requires knowledge by the defendant that his actions were illegal, an instruction that a dissenting judge said should have been given to jurors. Greer maintained that he did not believe he acted unlawfully, because he found the documents.
"Here the jury could have found Greer guilty of extortion even if it did not find that Greer knew he was not entitled to receive money from the casinos," Judge Owen Panner wrote in dissent. He added that jury instructions were confusing altogether.
The majority was not buying it, however.
"The government is not required to prove that the defendant knew that his actions were unlawful," Judge Jay Bybee ruled.
See Also:
- Yelp Accused of Extortion
- Wisconsin Teen Gets 15 Years for Facebook Sex-Extortion Scam
- Man Indicted for 'Cyber-Extortion' Threat Against Insurance Firm
- Man Charged in Facebook Sex-Extortion Plot
- Hacker Sentenced to 2 Years for MySpace Cyberstalking
- Computer Virus Leads to $20 Million Scam Targeting Pianist
- Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers
