Dad-daughter duo shop together at Sam’s Club – and scam stores out of $400k, feds say
The purchases started out relatively conservative.
Two charges for exactly $222.37 at a Sam’s Club in Winterville, North Carolina, about a week apart in 2015, court documents show.
Then Quenchelle Houpe and her father, Brian Houpe Sr., went bigger.
On May 14, 2015, the father and daughter walked out with $1,034 on a counterfeit credit card encoded with someone else’s account information. The charges continued on and off until 2018, prosecutors said.
Now they’re going to prison.
A federal judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina sentenced the Houpes to 39 months in prison on Thursday with three years of supervised release, prosecutors said in a news release.
They pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit access devices and one count of trafficking in counterfeit access devices last year, according to the release.
Using counterfeit credit cards encoded with stolen bank information, prosecutors said they were able to purchase $393,601.59 in merchandise from Sam’s Clubs in North and South Carolina, Virginia and New York.
Court records show a grand jury indicted the pair and a third co-conspirator, Belvin Pressley, in December 2018.
The case against Pressley is ongoing.
According to the indictment, the trio hit Sam’s Clubs in Winterville, Rocky Mount and Raleigh in North Carolina as well as Virginia Beach, Newport News and Chesapeake in Virginia.
The charges ranged from $5.50 to $4,336.08. Sometimes they purchased the items together, but often they worked alone.
In a sentencing memorandum submitted on behalf of Quenchelle Houpe, her attorney said “she worked parallel to Houpe Sr. and Pressley” but they “did their own thing.”
The scheme continued from April 2015 to September 2018, according to the release. More than 793 stolen account numbers were used in over 1,000 transactions
Lawyers for Quenchelle Houpe denied she was ever “an organizer, leader, manager or supervisor” in the scheme.
She sought a mitigated sentence of 2 years.
“Quenchelle has accepted responsibility and is repentant,” the memorandum states. “She is clearly a soul worth saving.”
Court documents show she will serve her sentence in Alderson, West Virginia, while Houpe Sr. will be in Butner, North Carolina.
Both will pay restitution, the amount of which remains to be determined.
This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Dad-daughter duo shop together at Sam’s Club – and scam stores out of $400k, feds say."
