Police arrested two men they say were driving around Darien and elsewhere, picking up goods shipped to residents after the residents’ identifying information and their Verizon account information had been stolen.
Police say the men had at least one Social Security number of a Darien man, along with enough information to use his account with Verizon to order three phones priced at a total of about $2,400. They (or someone else) had the man’s Social Security number, according to police.
Darien police gave this account (consisting of accusations not proven in court) of how they came to arrest the two men:
A Stanley Road resident received a Federal Express package at about 3 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 30. Inside it were three phones — two iPhone 6s devices, for which Verizon was charging her husband $751.99 each, and an iPhone 6 Plus, priced at 917.78 (these prices include taxes). The total comes to $2,421.76 that was being charged through the Verizon account.
The person who ordered the goods was able to give Verizon the last four digits of the customer’s Social Security number, according to Verizon’s security office.
She knew she hadn’t ordered them, and she called her husband to make sure he hadn’t either. Then she called Verizon to tell them that nobody at her home was responsible for the order. Then she got her husband back on the line because Verizon wouldn’t give her any information since the account was in her husband’s name.
Within about 10 minutes of the Fedex delivery, and as she was on the phone with Verizon and her husband, a man knocked on her door. She didn’t answer it. She got a look at the man, a short black man wearing a blue swetter and what she described as short dredlocks.
Darien police arrest photo for Yeiniesh Lee, 35, of Courtelyon Road, Brooklyn, N.Y.
After not getting an answer when he knocked on the front door, the man looked around the front and back of the house, then left. The woman didn’t see whether or not he got into a vehicle. She called police to tell them what was happening with the phones and the visit, which seemed suspicious to her so soon after the delivery.
Based on what police later discovered, she may have prevented quite a few thefts.
As an officer was on the way to her house, he saw a man who fit the description of the man at her house. He was a passenger in an Acura TL with New York license plates. The officer stopped the car on West Avenue near Edgerton Street.
The man is Yeineish Lee, 35, of Courtelyon Street in Brooklyn, N.Y. The driver was Daymon Arnold of East 37th Street in Brooklyn. Both men seemed nervous and upset, and police could see Arnold was shaking and sweating profusely. Lee wasn’t able to accurately describe where he had been for the past three hours.
Lee at first said he and Arnold were traveling from Bridgeport to New York City when they stopped on a side street in Darien to use the bathroom. After some more questioning, Arnold said he was sent to the Stanley Road residence to pick up a package, but that neither of the men knew what was in it.
Lee gave permission for an officer to look through his cell phone. The iPhone showed a screen shot of a spreadsheet containing the name of the husband of the woman on Stanley Road, along with the husband’s Social Security number, along with names, Social Security numbers and addresses for at least three other Darien residents, along with residents of other communities in Connecticut, New York state and Pennsylvania.
Police later got in touch with each Darien resident on the spreadsheet. One of them said he’d caught an order for a cell phone in his Verizon account information and had cancelled it before the phone was delivered. All the people contacted by police confirmed that the information about them on the spreadsheet was accurate. Police are contacting law enforcement authorities in other communities to tell them their residents are on the spreadsheet.
Another screen shot stored in the cell phone showed a Federal Express confirmation receipt for the Stanley Road delivery.
Darien police arrest photo of Daymon Arnold, 35, of East 37th Street, Brooklyn, N.Y.
The two were handcuffed and brought to Police Headquarters. There, Arnold said he wanted to speak to an officer in private. He said that Lee asked him to pick him up and drive him around to different locations to get packages. Lee had offered to pay him $200 when the job was done.
Lee also asked to speak privately with an officer, and did speak with a detective. Lee told the detective he was just picking up packages for someone else and, like Arnold, he said he didn’t know what was in the packages. He asked the detective if he could be given a warning rather than arrested.
The detective asked to look through Lee’s phones. Along with the spreadsheet, the phone contained information in a mapping program — the address on Stanley Road, along with those of three other Darien homes.
Arnold and Lee were each charged with committing identical crimes: third-degree larceny (larceny by false pretense) and criminal attempt to commit third-degree larceny. Because they had cooperated with police, their bonds were each set at $500, and Arnold paid his bond and was released later that evening. Both men are scheduled to appear Dec. 10 in state Superior Court in Stamford.
Police are still actively investigating the matter, and additional charges may be filed against the men.