Coca-Cola Scam: Oregon Mom And Daughter Plead Guilty

Albany, OR – An elaborate Coca-Cola bottle cap scheme devised by an Oregon mom and her daughter has come to an end with the two pleading guilty Friday to their deceit.

Carrie Jones, 55, and her daughter Sarah Jones, 31, were arrested following a corporate investigation in 2011 that tracked a suspiciously high number of winnings to an IP address in Albany.

The two managed to avoid jail time for the Coca-Cola scam, but have been ordered to serve two years of probation each, and pay back $48,000 to Coca-Cola.

According to FOX News, customers could text a unique code found underneath the cap of qualified Coca-Cola products to see if their code was a winner during a promotion that ran from May to August 2011. Winners then emailed their code to Coca-Cola to claim a prize code which they could then redeem for prizes like concert tickets.

In the Oregon mom and daughter plot, Sarah Jones created 650 different email addresses using false information, often other people’s identities. Valid bottle cap codes were then used to claim thousands of prize vouchers from Coca-Cola. Prize codes claimed by the two were sold on eBay.

The Joneses never revealed how they obtained the winning prize codes.

David Denhartigh, defense attorney, said this on behalf of Sarah Jones, “She realizes what she did was wrong … I think she’s a good person, and she made a big mistake.”

The Corvallis Gazette Times reported that Sarah Jones pleaded guilty to two felony counts, computer crime and identity theft.

The Oregon mom, Carrie Jones, pleaded guilty to two counts of computer crime against Coca-Cola.