GRAND RAPIDS, MI (WKZO AM/FM) — A Portage man pled guilty Friday, February 25, to charges of mail fraud and aggravated identity theft. This announced was made by U.S. Attorney Andrew Birge.
36-year-old Geoffrey Mark Hays Talsma, was the last of four individuals to plead guilty to charges of defrauding Amazon’s textbook rental program.
According to the plea agreement, Talsma defrauded Amazon by creating many Amazon and email accounts to rent textbooks. He then sold the books for profit, rather than returning them or paying the buy-out price. He had Amazon ship the books through the United States Postal Service or across state lines using private commercial carriers.
According to the United States Department of Justice, Talsma recruited and paid people who didn’t know the full truth to accept the shipments of stolen textbooks at their homes in a way so Amazon would not detect a pattern of several textbooks going to locations associated with him.
The department also said that he shared his profits with them after selling the textbooks online or at bookstores, and also ordered rental textbooks under the names of other people and pretend to be them when he called Amazon to falsely claim he did not receive the textbooks.
Talsma is scheduled for sentencing in the United States District Court on June 28. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years for mail fraud and two years for aggravated identity theft consecutive to his mail fraud sentence.
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