Crime & Safety

Florida Man Heads to Prison For Threatening Choice Hotels Customer Data Fraud

Burnt Mills-based Choice Hotels Internationals targeted.

Landing a new job is difficult in hard times, but one tech savvy Floridian took the process a little too far.

Marc A. Schoen, 55, was sentenced to prison after he alerted Choice Hotels, a Silver Spring-based company, that they had a glitch in their computer system and threatened to release customer information if they didn’t hire him to fix it, according to a release from the United States Attorney Office for the District of Maryland.

Choice Hotels International includes Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Quality Inn, Sleep Inn, Clarion and Econo Lodge.

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Schoen went as far as sending samples to the company of the information he found including customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, driver’s license numbers, email addresses, credit card numbers and credit card expiration dates. 

He asked Choice Hotels to hire him to fix its security flaws or he would sell the information, according to a plea agreement reached last August.  

Find out what's happening in Silver Springwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

He was sentenced to four months of incarceration, followed by four months home detention and two years of supervised release, along with court ordered fine of $5,000.    


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