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- A New Jersey man who posed as a former Patriots player was arrested for acquiring and selling three Tom Brady Super Bowl rings.
- One of the rings ended up being sold at auction for more than $337,000.
- Read more wild crime news here.
Scott Spina Jr., 24, of Roseland, New Jersey, was recently arrested and charged with impersonating a former New England Patriots player so he could acquire and sell three Super Bowl rings with the name “Brady” engraved on them.
According to the Department of Justice, Spina posed as a former player for the New England Patriots, which allowed him to purchase family versions of the team’s 2016 Super Bowl ring.
Spina allegedly claimed that the Super Bowl rings were going to be gifts to relatives of Tom Brady.
How did this happen?
Court documents say the scheme began in 2017 when Spina purchased a Super Bowl LI ring awarded to a Patriots player who had already left the team.
Spina ended up paying the player for the ring with at least one bad check, then sold it for $63,000 to a well-known broker of championship rings.
When Spina obtained the player ring, he also received the information that allowed the former player to purchase Super Bowl rings for family and friends that are slightly smaller than the player rings. “Spina then called the Ring Company, fraudulently identified himself as [the former player], and started ordering three family and friend Super Bowl LI rings with the name ‘Brady’ engraved on each one, which he falsely represented were gifts for the baby of quarterback Tom Brady,” according to the criminal information filed today. “The rings were at no time authorized by Tom Brady. Defendant Spina intended to obtain the three rings by fraud and to sell them at a substantial profit.”
Spina entered into an agreement with the Orange County man who purchased the player’s Super Bowl ring to sell him the three family rings that Spina now claimed Brady had given to his nephews. After agreeing to buy the three rings for $81,500 – nearly three times what Spina paid for the rings – the buyer started to believe that Brady did not have nephews, and he tried to withdraw from the deal. The same day that the buyer tried to back out, and the same day that Spina actually received the rings in November 2017, Spina immediately sold them to an auction house for $100,000. During an auction in February 2018, one of the family rings was sold for $337,219.
Related: Feds Nab Counterfeiters Shipping $441K Worth Of Very Real-Looking Fake MLB, NHL Championship Rings
“By pretending to be a New England Patriots player, the defendant was able to get Super Bowl rings from the company that issued them. But in offering the rings for sale, he was also selling their connection to Tom Brady — a story that simply did not hold up on close scrutiny,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik M. Silber.
The criminal’s rap sheet is lengthy
Spina was charged with one count of mail fraud, three counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.
On Monday, he agreed to plead guilty to the five felony offenses as part of a plea agreement filed on Monday in United States District Court. He was also ordered to pay restitution to the former Patriots player, identified only as T.J.
In 2018, Spina was sentenced to 35 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution of $516,396.33 for selling sneakers and other high-end items to customers that included professional athletes then failing to deliver. He was also found guilty of using credit card information provided by his customers and others without their authorization.
Now he faces a statutory maximum penalty of 92 years in federal prison, but will likely serve substantially less time than that, according to the Department of Justice statement.