ATLANTA - Horacio Sanchez-Lopez of Chamblee has been sentenced to 14 months in federal prison for conspiring to manufacture, sell, and distribute counterfeit federal Permanent Resident and Social Security cards.
According to U.S. Attorney John Horn, in the summer of 2014 Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents began investigating a conspiracy that sold counterfeit identification documents in the Chamblee area. Working through cooperating individuals, agents bought several pairs of Permanent Resident and Social Security cards from Horacio Sanchez-Lopez and a co-conspirator, Jorge Manuel Rosado. Sanchez-Lopez or Rosado delivered the documents to customers who ordered them over the phone from another individual, and they sold the documents to confidential informants for between $80 and $120 per set.
On October 16, 2014, agents raided a house in Chamblee where Sanchez-Lopez, Rosado, and others lived. While the conspirators had moved the computer they had been using to make the fraudulent documents, agents found, among other things, a used printer ribbon that lab analysis later found contained 215 images of ID cards. Agents also recovered 93 fraudulent cards that had been cut in half and thrown in a trash can, and a smart phone that contained thousands of passport-style photos for ID cards.
Sanchez-Lopez, 42, was sentenced last week by U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May to one year, two months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Sanchez-Lopez is an illegal immigrant from Mexico, and has been ordered to be transferred for deportation proceedings. He pleaded guilty to those charges earlier this fall.
Jorge Manuel Rosado, 45, Chamblee, pleaded guilty in September to a conspiracy charge and was sentenced to prison for fifteen months by Judge May.
