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New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com 
Identity thieves lurk in jury pools
By BARBARA ROSS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, February 26th, 2006

Jurors who already have to endure long security lines, bland coffee and tedious witnesses have a new courthouse hazard: con artists trying to steal their identities.
Sherrill Spatz, the state court system's inspector general, said her office has investigated a dozen cases in the last two years of scammers trying to trick potential jurors into giving up personal and financial information.

In the last two weeks, Spatz said, a person pretending to be a court official called a Westchester woman to say that her husband was in big trouble because he didn't report for jury duty.

The caller then started asking about the husband's employment and other personal data, saying the courts had to update the information they had on file.

State officials warn that prospective jurors are never asked to reveal such information.

The courts do send out qualifying questionnaires before summoning people to jury duty, said Vincent Homenick, chief clerk for jurors in Manhattan, but the forms only ask if the person is a citizen and a county resident, is over 18, has any felony convictions, understands English and has served on any other state or federal juries in the last four years.

It was one of these questionnaires that inspired ex-con Jovan Fludd to send out his own form in 2002 in which he asked prospective jurors all the usual questions - plus their Social Security numbers.

Fludd mailed questionnaires to upscale areas, mostly on the upper East Side, and had them returned to a Harlem postal box.

But "Fludd wasn't a good crook," said Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Leroy Frazer. He applied for credit cards but never got any because he had no prior addresses or other identifying information.

Officials said Fludd persisted by revising his questionnaire, asking for the additional data. That prompted a suspicious lawyer to call Homenick's office.

Fludd was arrested before he got any credit cards from his second questionnaire. He pleaded guilty to fraud charges and was sentenced to 2-1/2 to five years in state prison.

So far, Fludd is the only jury scammer to be caught in New York because he used the mail, said Spatz. All the others, working outside the city, have approached jurors by phone and used technology to keep the calls from being traced.

Jury commissioners around the state are getting aggressive about warning prospective jurors, Spatz added. "People are happy to participate in jury duty and we want to make sure they are not scared off."