Author:
Don't Blame Me...
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Date Posted: 20:09:36 12/22/10 Wed
Now we have the case of a prison guard in Rhode Island who gave himself a promotion to head of the state's Department of Corrections — on Facebook.
The guard, 27-year-old Matthew Lacroix, started a Facebook page calling himself A.T. Wall II, who has been director of Rhode Island's Department of Corrections for the past 10 years. Not exactly the identity of a low-profile person to impersonate.
But wait, there's more: Lacroix, dumb enough to pretend he was his boss on Facebook, was smart enough not to use his own computer, for tracing purposes. Instead, he used his neighbors' computer when he was on Facebook as the prisons' chief.
The neighbors, of course, knew nothing about his ruse, and were plenty shocked went state police showed up at their house, after linking the fraudulent account to the IP address from their computer.
Tracey E. Zeckhausen, a spokeswoman for the corrections department, told the Providence Journal that police were notified by the department after it found about about the Facebook page in August. She said Facebook took down the page within hours of being notified.
Lacroix pleaded guilty last week to a charge of "use of fraudulent information," and was ordered to pay a $500 fine. He is also on administrative leave — with pay — while he awaits an administrative hearing from the Department of Corrections.
Oh, those wacky prison guards; when will they learn? Last year, another prison guard also took to Facebook and befriended some of the inmates he supervised at HMP Leicester prison in Britain. On his Facebook page, he even shared a photo of himself with a man convicted of fraud serving a prison sentence for more than 24 offenses. That guard, Nathan Singh, was dismissed for "gross misconduct."
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