A Florida man has been charged with fraudulently charging building supplies to a building store using stolen identities and using the supplies to build a home whilst he served a 25-year prison sentence.
37-year-old Jared Murray has been accused of running a complex home-building operation from his jail cell whilst serving a 25-year sentence for participation in home robbery. In prison since 2011, he used smuggled cellphones to arrange the purchase of an empty lot in Lake Placid, Florida.
Over the six months that followed the sale of the lot, Murray would find the names of contractors who had open lines of credit at the building store, and use their identities to order supplies on their accounts and then have them shipped to the lot.
Murray would then allegedly sell any left-over supplies on an online market place, using the money to hire more contractors and get more supplies.
The three-bedroom and two-bathroom house is still being built and is listed as on sale for $185 000.
Contractors and building store employees began to notice something was amiss when they kept getting fraudulent charges. When Murray used the wrong name when answering the phone one of the contractors realized something was wrong.
Eventually a female accomplice of Murray’s was caught accepting supplies on his behalf, and she led the FBI to Jared Murray.
A major FBI investigation is now under way.