Mich. Man Held on Charges of Defrauding Amazon Textbook Program
Federal authorities arrested a Portage, Michigan, man on a felony indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, charging him with mail and wire fraud, interstate transportation of stolen property, aggravated identity theft and making false statements to the…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
FBI, said DOJ Friday. Geoffrey Mark Hays Talsma, 36, allegedly rented thousands of textbooks from Amazon’s rental program for five years with no intention of returning them or paying the established buyout price for the textbooks, said DOJ. He’s accused of selling them on the internet and defrauding Amazon by repeatedly creating new Amazon accounts “and using variations of other data to avoid detection,” it said. “Fraud undermines the trust of our customers, and jeopardizes the value and selection that entrepreneurs, authors, and publishers provide to millions of customers through our stores,” said Amazon. Efforts to reach Talsma’s lawyers for comment Monday were unsuccessful.