After a three-day trial, Chris Suhail Folad, 37, of Franklin, and Khaled Nabil Abdel Fattah, 38, of Antioch, were convicted Friday by a federal jury of conspiracy to commit computer access fraud and wire fraud.
They were also convicted on 19 individual counts of computer access fraud and 11 counts of wire fraud, announced David Rivera, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee.
According to the evidence at the trial, between January 2009 and March 2010, Folad and Fattah used passwords to a local company’s ATM machines to alter the denomination distribution amounts to lead the machines to believe they were dispensing $1 bills, when, in fact, the machines were dispensing $20 bills.
The company, Safe Cash Systems, LLC. (Safe Cash) based in Nashville, places machines in convenience stores, bars and restaurants throughout Nashville. Safe Cash’s machines only carry $20 bills.
Folad previously worked at Safe Cash as an ATM technician and knew the passwords needed to change the denomination distribution amounts.
The evidence showed that after the denomination distribution amounts were changed, the defendants would receive 20 times more cash from the machines than the amount that was debited from their bank accounts. During a 14-month period, Folad and Fattah made over 800 withdrawals from Safe Cash ATMs, making as many as 20 ATM withdrawals in a single day. The defendants used nine bank accounts and 17 bank cards to perpetrate their fraud and stole over $600,000 from Safe Cash.
Folad and Fattah are scheduled to be sentenced on March 6, 2017, and face up to 20 years in prison.
This case was investigated by the United States Secret Service. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Henry C. Leventis and Thomas Jaworski.
