A Loveland man who sold non-existent airline tickets to nearly 90 victims has been sentenced to more than four years in prison and ordered to pay $495,397 in restitution to his victims.
According to court documents, the man, Christopher B. Watts, sold the non-existent tickets between April 2005 and October 2007. He told the victims he had access to free or discounted airline tickets based on a retirement package he had received from an airline where he formerly worked.
He sold the customers non-existent “books” of tickets usually containing multiples of five tickets.
In order to hide the fraudulent nature of his scheme, Watts said the records related to the airline tickets were exclusively maintained in an electronic format and he was required to personally purchase them.
In order to string the victims along, according to court papers, Watts provided some customers with genuine airline tickets, usually through a travel agent, and then told his customers that these were the redeemed discount tickets.
On a few occasions, he offered customers additional discounts on books of tickets if they would use credit cards.
Watts then used the credit card numbers of those customers to purchase full-fare tickets for other customers who thought they were redeeming discounted tickets.
Watts was sentenced to a total of 51 months. The case was investigated by the FBI.
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
