A 22-year-old Maple Grove man was sentenced today in federal court to prison on one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft in connection with a scheme to steal credit card account information and use it to add value to gift cards that he purchased.

On March 31 in Minneapolis, United States District Court Judge James Rosenbaum sentenced Zachary Wiley Mann to 60 months in prison and three years of supervised release. Mann was charged on June 16, 2008, and pleaded guilty on June 27.

According to Mann’s plea agreement, he devised a scheme to defraud and used the Internet to illegally obtain credit card account information from individuals and used that information without authorization for his own personal financial benefit from January 2008 to March 2008.

Mann obtained credit card account information from thousands of victims by “hacking” into an Internet-based order processing server, and used some of the stolen credit card numbers to add value to gift cards he purchased for small dollar amounts at restaurants. After he had used the stolen information to fraudulently inflate the value of the gift cards, he then placed ads for the cards on “Craigslist” and resold them.

Specifically, on Feb. 11, 2008, Mann, for the purpose of executing the alleged scheme, connected via the Internet to the Panera Bread Web site, and did knowingly use, without lawful authority, a means of identification (i.e. credit card account information) of another person.

According to the plea agreement, Mann committed these offenses while he was on supervised release in connection with a December 2006 federal conviction for conspiracy to commit computer fraud and aggravated identity theft in Florida.

This case was the result of an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the police departments of Maple Grove and Shakopee. It was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy C. Rank.