THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 14, 1996 TAG: 9609140246
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: 41 lines
Oh, what a tangled Web he wove.
Norfolk Southern says a Chesapeake teen-ager found a clever new use for his home computer: He allegedly downloaded the railroad's logo from the Internet, used WordPerfect to create fake purchase orders, faxed them to vendors and got $7,000 in computer equipment billed to Norfolk Southern.
He is now in a Florida jail, awaiting extradition to Virginia.
Norfolk Southern police said they have charged the young man - Kenneth Michael Martin, 19, of Princess Anne Crescent in Chesapeake - with three felonies: computer fraud, obtaining property under false pretenses and fraud or forgery of a document.
Special Agent J.R. Simpkins of the railroad's police force said he cracked the high-tech crime with old-fashioned shoe leather.
Here's how Simpkins said it happened:
Martin, a graduate of Western Branch High School, got the Norfolk Southern logo from the company's World Wide Web page. He then created fake purchase orders and faxed them from his computer to vendors in three states on Aug. 6 and 7. He ordered $10,000 worth of equipment and asked that it be delivered to a Greenbrier address, a vacant office suite.
Two companies - one in Texas, one in Pennsylvania - delivered about $7,000 worth of equipment, mainly expanded hard drives, memory and disks.
Who will pay the bogus bills? ``The vendors will probably end up having to eat it,'' Simpkins said. ``They didn't verify the orders.''
Norfolk Southern caught up with Martin when one vendor checked the order and found it was fake, Simpkins said. He said he got the young man's name when Martin signed for a Federal Express package.
Simpkins said Martin was arrested last week in Lee County, Fla., near Fort Myers, for other crimes. He is awaiting extradition. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic JOHN EARLE
The Virginian-Pilot
KEYWORDS: ARREST NORFOLK SOUTHERN COMPUTER FRAUD FORGERY by CNB