Maryland Criminal Defense · Theft & White Collar

Identity Theft and Credit Card Fraud in Maryland: How a Single Transaction Becomes a Fifteen-Year Felony

The dollar amount decides the charge. What you say in the first two weeks decides the case.

By Amir Guerami, Esq. · The Guerami Law Firm, LLC

You are reading this because a card was used, a name was used, or an account was opened — and now there is a detective's card on your kitchen counter, or a summons in your hand, or a bank investigator leaving voicemails. You may not even think what happened was a crime. You may believe you had permission. You may be covering for someone.

None of that changes the exposure. Identity fraud is one of the few Maryland charges where the paperwork does most of the prosecutor's work, where the charges multiply on their own, and where the felony line is drawn by arithmetic rather than by how bad you are as a person.

Here is the honest picture, and then the path forward.

The Statute

The Law in Plain English

Maryland's identity fraud statute is Md. Code, Crim. Law § 8-301. Strip away the legal language and it prohibits knowingly and willfully taking, possessing, or using another person's personal identifying information, without that person's consent, in order to obtain a benefit, a credit, goods, services, or to avoid paying something you owe.

"Personal identifying information" is broad. A name. A date of birth. A Social Security number. A driver's license number. A bank account or credit card number. A PIN or password. A biometric identifier. You do not have to walk out of a store with merchandise to violate the statute — possessing that information with the intent to use it fraudulently can be enough.

The penalty turns on the dollar value of what was obtained:

• Under $1,500 — a misdemeanor carrying up to 18 months of incarceration and a fine.

• $1,500 or more — a felony carrying up to 15 years and a substantial fine.

Maryland law also treats organized activity more harshly. Where a case involves multiple victims or a pattern of conduct rather than a single act, the State has tools to charge it as a scheme, and prosecutors will use them.

The line between eighteen months and fifteen years is fifteen hundred dollars. Not intent. Not remorse. A number.

How Charges Multiply

Credit Card Charges Are Separate — and They Stack

Credit and debit card offenses sit in their own part of the Criminal Law Article, and they are written as several distinct crimes rather than one. In practice, the same conduct can generate charges for:

• Stealing a credit or debit card, or taking one you know was stolen or lost.

• Possessing a card belonging to someone else with intent to use it.

• Using a card without the cardholder's authority to obtain money, goods, or services.

• Making, altering, or possessing a counterfeit or forged card or card data.

• Fraud in a merchant setting — running transactions you know are unauthorized.

Layer on theft under Md. Code, Crim. Law § 7-104, which grades by value: under $100, $100 to under $1,500, $1,500 to under $25,000, $25,000 to under $100,000, and $100,000 and above — with the felony line at $1,500 and a maximum of 20 years at the top tier.

The result is that one weekend of card use can produce a charging document with a dozen counts. That is not a prosecutor being vindictive. That is how the statutes are built. But it means the number of counts on the paper you were handed is a poor measure of how strong the case actually is.

The Insider Lens

What Prosecutors Actually Look At

When I was the one filing these charges as a Maryland State's Attorney, I was not evaluating your character. I was evaluating provability. Five questions drove almost every decision.

• Volume. A single unauthorized transaction reads as impulse. A sequence — fourteen swipes across nine days, three stores, two states — reads as intent. Intent is the element that is hardest for the State to prove and easiest for a defendant to hand over.

• Victim count. One victim is a case. Four victims is a scheme, and a scheme is charged, plea-negotiated, and sentenced differently. Multiple names in a wallet, a phone, or a notes app changes the entire posture of a file.

• Documentation. Card fraud is the most heavily documented offense in the criminal code. Point-of-sale timestamps. Store surveillance. Card-network authorization logs. Delivery addresses. IP addresses. Cell-site data. App receipts placing you at the store at 9:14 p.m. Prosecutors like these cases because the evidence is generated automatically and does not have to remember anything on the witness stand.

• Statements. Overwhelmingly, the strongest evidence in these cases came from the defendant. Not a formal confession — an explanation. "I thought she said I could." "I only used it twice." Each of those sentences concedes an element the State would otherwise have to prove.

• Restitution posture. Whether the loss has been repaid, and how, affects charging and plea offers more than most defendants realize. It also has to be handled correctly, because how you repay can become evidence of guilt.

The best witness the State had in almost every fraud case I charged was the defendant, explaining himself before he had a lawyer.

Avoidable Damage

The Mistakes That Do the Most Harm

! Do Not Do These Things

Every one of these has turned a defensible case into a guilty plea:

• Talking to the bank's fraud investigator. They are not government agents, so the usual warnings often do not apply — and their written reports land on a prosecutor's desk anyway.

• Repaying with an apology attached. An email that says "I'm so sorry, I'll pay it all back" is a signed confession with a payment plan.

• Deleting texts, apps, or photos. Forensic tools recover most of it, and in Maryland that conduct can generate additional charges on top of the fraud.

• Assuming "it was family" ends the inquiry. Consent is a real defense — but it must be developed with evidence, not asserted after the fact.

• Waiting. Store video is often overwritten in 30 to 90 days. The footage showing someone else at the register disappears while you decide whether to hire a lawyer.

The pattern in all five is the same: people try to make the problem smaller by being cooperative, and instead they hand the State the two things it cannot easily prove on its own — identity and intent.

The Defense

What a Real Defense Looks Like

Fraud prosecutions are built on inference. The State stacks documents and asks a jury to conclude you were the person behind them. Inference is attackable.

Identity of the user. An account in your household is not a finger on the keypad. Shared phones, shared cards, shared addresses, and stored payment credentials all create genuine reasonable doubt about who actually conducted a transaction.

Authorization and consent. In family and relationship cases, history matters — months of permitted use, joint accounts, prior repayment arrangements, text threads showing an ongoing understanding. A permission that was revoked but never communicated is not a crime the day after.

How the evidence was obtained. Phone extractions, account records, and search warrants all carry legal requirements. A motion to suppress that succeeds on the digital evidence can end a fraud case outright, because there is usually nothing else.

The arithmetic. Because grading is driven by dollar value and aggregation, contesting which transactions properly belong in the total is substantive defense work, not accounting. Moving a total across the $1,500 line moves a felony to a misdemeanor.

★ Where the Leverage Is

Even when the underlying facts are difficult, these are the levers that protect a future:

• Restitution structured through counsel — full credit at sentencing, without creating an admission.

• Aggregation challenges — every disputed transaction removed from the total moves you toward a lower grade.

• Probation before judgment (PBJ) — a Maryland disposition that, when granted and completed, avoids a conviction on the record. It is discretionary, never guaranteed, and it is earned with preparation.

• The mitigation package — employment verification, counseling where appropriate, community ties, and a clean prior record, assembled early rather than the morning of sentencing.

Federal Exposure

One More Warning Before You Decide Anything

If a real person's Social Security number or identifying document is involved, this case can be adopted federally. Federal aggravated identity theft carries a mandatory two-year sentence that runs consecutive to whatever else is imposed. There is no probation around it. Any strategy in a Maryland identity fraud case has to account for that possibility from day one.

A charge is an accusation, not a verdict. But in fraud cases, what you say in the first two weeks often decides the outcome long before a judge ever sees the file.

Identity theft and credit card cases feel overwhelming because of the count sheet. They are, in reality, cases about two questions — who did it and how much — and both of those are contestable when the work starts early enough.

Legal Disclaimer

This article is for general educational purposes only. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Maryland law changes, and every case turns on its own facts. If you or someone you love has been charged, speak with a Maryland criminal defense attorney about your specific situation before making any decisions.

Do Not Plead First

If you have been charged with a crime or a serious traffic offense in Maryland, do not plead until you have spoken to a lawyer who has stood on both sides of the courtroom. Contact The Guerami Law Firm, LLC through NoPleaMD.com for a confidential consultation with Amir Guerami and his team.