United States v. Kvashuk, No. 20-30251 (9th Cir. 2022)
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The Ninth Circuit affirmed defendant's conviction for 18 fraud-related counts in a case where defendant stole $10 million in digital gift cards from his employer, Microsoft, using login credentials he stole from his coworkers. The panel concluded that there was probable cause to support the search warrant where, considering the totality of the circumstances, the search warrant affidavit shows a fair probability that evidence of defendant's crimes would be found on a computer at his residence. Therefore, there was an adequate nexus between the unlawful activities and the place to be search. The panel also concluded that the evidence supporting the application was not stale.
The court rejected defendant's contention that his convictions for aggravated identity theft are infirm because the test accounts do not constitute a "means of identification" under 18 U.S.C. 1028A(a)(1), in that the accounts do not "identify a specific individual." Rather, the panel concluded that the test accounts' purpose, prerequisites, and functionality do not bear on whether they identify a specific individual. The panel stated that the test accounts at issue here clearly could be used to identify specific Microsoft employees because the company’s investigators actually did identify four individuals. The panel further concluded that the district court's exclusion of evidence regarding defendant's asylum status did not deny him a defense. Nor did the district court abuse its discretion in excluding the evidence. Finally, the district court properly denied the motion to remove Juror No. 12.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel affirmed Volodymyr Kvashuk’s conviction on 18 fraud-related counts in a case in which Kvashuk stole $10 million in digital gift cards from his employer, Microsoft, using login credentials he filched from his coworkers. Kvashuk challenged the denial of his motion to suppress evidence seized from his house on the ground that the search warrant lacked probable cause, arguing that the warrant affidavit failed to establish a nexus between the unlawful activities and the places to be searched. Considering the totality of the circumstances, the panel concluded that the search warrant affidavit showed a fair probability that evidence of Kvashuk’s crimes would be found on a computer at his residence, and that there was therefore an adequate nexus between the unlawful activities and the place to be searched. The panel rejected Kvashuk’s argument that the evidence supporting the application was stale. Rejecting Kvashuk’s challenge to the district court’s denial of his request for a hearing under Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978), the panel wrote that Kvashuk identified no false or misleading statement in the affidavit, let alone one that the affiant made intentionally or recklessly. Kvashuk contended that his two convictions for aggravated identity theft, which stem from his use of coworkers’ accounts intended for testing the Microsoft Universal Store, are infirm because the test accounts do not UNITED STATES V. KVASHUK 3 constitute a “means of identification” under 18 U.S.C. § 1028A(a)(1), in that the accounts do not “identify a specific individual.” Rejecting this contention, the panel wrote that the test accounts’ purpose, prerequisites, and functionality do not bear on whether they “identify a specific individual”; that the test accounts here could be and did identify specific employees; and that the Universal Store team’s limited sharing of test accounts and passwords was insufficient to differentiate the test accounts from any other business email account associated with a specific person. Kvashuk contended that the district court violated his due process rights by preventing him from presenting a complete defense—in particular, by excluding evidence of his status in the United States as an asylum applicant from Ukraine. He argued that his sole defense to the prosecution’s theory that he used crypto currency to conceal the money trail from his crime was that he did not intend to defraud Microsoft but used Bitcoin as an asylum seeker to avoid detection by the Ukrainian government. The panel wrote that while testifying about his asylum status might have strengthened his defense that he did not defraud Microsoft, Kvashuk was able to raise the defense without it. The panel held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in concluding that any additional probative value in disclosing Kvashuk’s immigration status would be substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice from the jury’s knowledge that he could suffer immigration consequences if convicted on the charges. Kvashuk contended that the district court should have dismissed a juror because the juror had experience with the Universal Store team. The panel wrote that merely working for the same large organization as the defendant is an insufficient basis for implied bias, and concluded that 4 UNITED STATES V. KVASHUK because the juror’s personal experience on the Universal Store team was not similar or identical to the fact pattern at issue in the trial, the district court properly denied the motion to remove him.
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