LAKE CITY, Fla. – Two men with a history of arrests for fraud were arrested after Florida Highway Patrol troopers say they busted the men with multiple fake Florida driver’s licenses.
According to the arrest report, on Tuesday afternoon, a trooper stopped a minivan on I-75 near a rest area after noticing the van was speeding as it followed too closely behind another vehicle.
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When the trooper ran the names the driver and passenger, troopers said, both came back with warrants for their arrest and that’s when another trooper arrived on scene.
The driver was identified as Darius J. Griffin, 21, of Riverview Florida. His passenger was identified as DeJohn Anthony Thomas, 22, of Chicago.
According to the report, one of the troopers later learned that Griffin was on probation out of Hillsborough County after he was convicted of trafficking counterfeit credit cards, identity theft and the fraudulent use of a credit card re-encoder. The report said troopers also learned that Griffin never got permission to leave the county from his probation officer.
A condition of Griffin’s probation was that he was not to have any contact with Thomas because the two had a history of committing fraud together, the report said.
As both men were being taken into custody, one of the troopers asked Griffin if he wanted to put on his shoes since he was barefoot during the traffic stop, according to the report. When the trooper pulled the shoes from the van, he noted in the report that he discovered six fraudulent Florida driver’s licenses in the left shoe. Investigators said a search of the van led to the discovery of two more fraudulent Florida driver’s licenses that were concealed inside jogging pants.
According to the report, when troopers ran all eight of the fraudulent driver’s licenses, four of the licenses came back as “innocent parties.”
Griffin was ordered held without bond until he can be extradited back to Tampa. Bond for Thomas was set at $160,000.
Hillsborough County court records show that Thomas currently has an open criminal case from 2017 when he and Griffin were both arrested at Tampa International Airport on multiple charges of possessing forged credit cards. Thomas’s next court date on those charges is scheduled for January 3rd in Tampa.