A New Jersey man has agreed to plead guilty in a convoluted fraud scheme involving Super Bowl rings. It all started in September 2017, the year the New England Patriots won Super Bowl LI, when Scott Spina, 24, sent an Instagram message to a former Patriots player who had left the team after the big win, NBC News reports. Spina offered to buy his Super Bowl ring and the player agreed, but Spina handed over a bad check when they met to do the trade. Spina, who later sold the ring for $63,000, had also somehow gotten a document containing information about a company that sells Super Bowl rings, plus the former Patriots player's username and password for the company's website.
Posing as the player, Spina ordered three family versions of the Super Bowl ring, which are slightly smaller but otherwise very similar, which he had engraved with the name "Brady," pretending they were gifts for Tom Brady's baby. He then contacted the broker who'd purchased the original ring, posing as a friend of Brady's nephews and claiming the nephews wanted to sell the Super Bowl rings Brady was giving them for Thanksgiving. That broker ultimately got suspicious and backed out of the deal, but Spina sold the rings to an auction house for $100,000 (more than three times what Spina paid for them, per the New York Post) and one of them ultimately sold at auction for $337,219. Spina, who was previously sentenced to 35 months behind bars in another fraud case involving high-end sneakers, will appear in court Jan. 31. (More weird crimes stories.)
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