A Pennsylvania woman faces up to six years in prison on Arkansas fraud charges after a scammer opened a CashApp account with her Social Security number and used it to collect $1,000, 404 Media reported on Tuesday.
Amanda Smith, 47, answered the door of her home one afternoon in April to find sheriff’s deputies holding a warrant for a crime committed more than a thousand miles away, in a state she says she has never visited. She spent three nights in the local jail, she said, with the lights on constantly and a guard shining a light into her cell every hour, without knowing why she had been arrested. She now faces charges of computer fraud, unlawful use of a communication device and theft of property, according to a court filing.
According to the prosecuting attorney’s affidavit, Arkansas police responded to a fraud report on Feb. 4. A buyer had found items for sale on Facebook Marketplace, and the seller told him to send $1,000 to “his wife’s CashApp account.” The seller’s Facebook account turned out to be hacked; the payment went to an account in the name Amanda Smith, username $Smithy5687, created at the end of January, days before the scam.
Investigators served a search warrant on Block Inc., which owns CashApp, and got back records carrying Ms. Smith’s Social Security number and date of birth, information CashApp collects from users as a fraud precaution. A Detective Poole said he confirmed the identification with a copy of Ms. Smith’s driver’s license and Accurint, a LexisNexis tool police use to query public and proprietary records. “Det Poole sent a search warrant to Cash App. The information received from Cash App showed the account receiving the $1000 belonged to D [defendant, Amanda Smith],” the case record reads.
Most of the account’s other data does not match her, according to 404 Media’s review of the records produced in discovery. The Philadelphia address on file is one neither she nor her husband, Josh, ever lived at, though they once lived in the same ZIP code. The phone number is not her current one, and the same number was used to open a Venmo account under an entirely different name about a week before the CashApp account, 404 Media found with data from the open-source intelligence firm OSINT Industries. The signup device was an iPhone running iOS 16.1.1, an operating system from 2022; Ms. Smith carries an iPhone 13 mini on iOS 26.5.2, according to a screenshot she shared. And the IP addresses behind the account’s creation and the scam itself trace to Verizon’s wireless network. Ms. Smith is an AT&T customer, says she has never had a Verizon plan and never used the name “smithy5687.”
Ms. Smith’s theory is that someone stole her identity, perhaps through a breach like the National Public Data breach in December 2024, and opened the account. She has the records only because of discovery in her own criminal case. When she first contacted the company, “CashApp refused to provide me with any information about the account, because I couldn’t prove that I was the owner,” she told 404 Media.
Her bail was set at $50,000, but she recalled being told not to bother paying it because she would be held for extradition anyway. Days after her arrest she was taken, chained and shackled, to an extradition hearing. She and Josh then drove to Arkansas for a court appearance rather than trust a flight’s schedule, she said, nervous she might be arrested again. After the hearing she was fingerprinted, photographed and released on another $20,000 bail. She is home now, awaiting the case.
A private investigator Ms. Smith hired, Max Ponte, told 404 Media in an email that he has “legitimate questions about the evidence used to identify her.” “The central issue is the distinction between identifying a person by name and establishing that the person actually operated or controlled an account,” he wrote. “Based on my review of the available case materials, I have concerns about whether investigators sufficiently established that connection before pursuing criminal charges against Amanda.”
Her lawyer, Jason Horton, wrote in an email that he is “actively trying to get Amanda’s case dismissed short of a jury trial” and “will do all I can to make sure justice is served in this case.” CashApp did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the prosecutor, Jeffrey Sams, did not respond to a request asking whether investigators took any steps to verify the CashApp data beyond what the detective described in court records.
The case echoes others in which police data pointed at the wrong person. Last month Lindsey Isaacs told Congress how one ping from a Flock license-plate camera put her in a Florida jail for 13 days before anyone looked closely.
“They’re trying to turn it into my problem [...] that I need to prove that I’m innocent,” Ms. Smith told 404 Media. “That’s not what I grew up believing was the way it worked.”