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Thursday, October 9, 2014

More Fox C-6 Credit Card Data! 2012-2013 DISCOVER Card Statements

I've been waiting weeks for the 2012-2013 DISCOVER card statements and prior years. I was especially looking forward to reviewing the June 2013 statement. It had the hotel charges for the MarzanoGate Conference. You know, the conference that was more like an all expenses paid luxury vacation for 6 couples from the Fox C-6 school district rather than a Professional Development Conference!

The MarzanoGate Conference was the one that Dianne Critchlow offered to pay for meals for spouses even though they weren't employed by the district. Fox's newest but not yet employed Assistant Superintendent Andy J Arbeitman was invited to go to the conference by Dianne Critchlow even though he hadn't officially started working for the district yet.

The DISCOVER card statements were scanned in color at high resolution and sent to me the other day so the file size is over 70MB at the moment. I then scanned them using PDF-XChange Viewer to run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software built into PDF-XChange viewer in order to make them text searchable in a PDF viewer. I will work on exporting the pages to black and white at a lower resolution to shrink the file for slower internet connections. To make the statements easier to read, I assembled the individual statements into a single file and posted them online.

After I received the statements I noticed a few unusual charges and asked Fox's CFO about them. One of them was for a BALANCE TRANSFER of -$502.50 on 04/05/2013 and a $502.50 charge to MACY'S EAST #0054 LANGHOME PA on 03/25/2013 which appeared to be related. At first glance this appeared to me a charge had mistakenly been made on a school DISCOVER card for a purchase at MACY'S and the amount was later corrected using a BALANCE TRANSFER.

It was explained to me in an email from Fox's CFO that Jerome K's credit card had been compromised and that a new card was issued and a BALANCE TRANSFER was done to correct the charge. Brazeal said it seemed odd to him as to how it was corrected.

I found it odd as well that a BALANCE TRANSFER was made by DISCOVER to correct a compromised card rather than issuing a CREDIT as was done by VISA when Dan Baker's VISA card was compromised and charges were made at a Colorado WALMART store. Ultimately the MACY'S charge for $502.50 was corrected and the school did not have to pay for the charge.

There was also a mistaken charge made by former Fox C-6 CFO Jim Berblinger for $20 on 05/16/2013 to MERCY CLINIC SURG SPEC CREVE COEUR MO which was repaid to the district by Mr. Berblinger.