A former Congressional employee was nabbed last week for swiping a load of government cell phones and flipping them for cash. Christopher Southerland, aged 43, faced the music as a federal indictment was laid bare, detailing his alleged scheme of pocketing over 240 government-funded cell phones, announced U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro.
While Southerland was supposed to be keeping the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure wired up, he apparently had other plans, from April 2020 until July 2023, to be exact. His job gave him the keys to the cell phone cabinet, so he could hook up committee staff with phones as needed, but the committee only counted about 80 heads, not nearly enough to explain the mountain of phones Southerland directed to his Maryland home between January and May, last year.
The jig was up when someone bought one of these hot items off eBay, and it screamed Capitol tech support on first boot. This unwary buyer did their civic duty and rang up the number, a call that got the ball rolling on Southerland’s unraveling operation.
Investigators say Southerland hawked over 200 of the cell phones to a pawn shop that was in on the game, slicing the devices up "in parts" to work around the tech leash the House keeps on their hardware. This was part of Southerland's clever, if not failing, misdirection, according to the official statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The Feds pieced it all together with help from the diligent folks over at the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI, while the U.S. Attorney’s Office rolled out the charges.
