Forest Service worker gets prison for ID theft

With co-workers’ names, man took out credit cards

A former U.S. Forest Service worker who went AWOL from the Milwaukee office early this year has been sentenced to four years in prison for stealing co-workers’ identities and running up nearly $100,000 in credit card debt.

In a letter to the judge, Michael K. Hanan said the money all went to slot machines at Potawatomi Hotel & Casino. He said what started as an escape from stress “very quickly grew into a severe gambling addiction.” After that led to financial ruin, he said, he turned to ID theft and fraud.

Hanan, 35, of Sussex, was sentenced Monday by U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, who also imposed three years of supervised release after the prison term. As part of a plea agreement, Hanan pleaded guilty in September to one charge of credit card fraud and one of aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors dismissed four other counts and agreed to recommend the four-year prison term.

Hanan, a 15-year veteran of the Forest Service, worked in the human resources office, where he had access to past and current employees’ personal information, which he used to obtain cards from Meijer, Sears, Kmart and other retailers. He used those to buy prepaid gift cards, then used those to reload debit cards, which he used to get cash.

According to federal court records, Hanan got the cards from February to May of this year, some even after his remote network access had been terminated because he wasn’t coming to work or answering emails. He did have a government-issued laptop computer, however, and agents assumed that he was able to use a password to log in and get records stored on a hard drive.

After agents noticed that many cards reported by the victims were associated with Hanan’s phone number, they reviewed security video from some of the stores in Wisconsin and Illinois where the cards were used and saw Hanan.

He was arrested in May in Sussex and indicted. The indictment listed only five victims and a total theft of almost $7,000, but prosecutors say the total losses were more than $95,000. Besides his co-workers, Hanan used identities of his own family to obtain some of the credit cards.