August 2016

A subject was sentenced in United States District Court to serve the longest prison term possible under Federal sentencing guidelines for claiming he was earning huge profits on a stock trading formula where he was actually using investors’ money to buy homes and luxury items. The subject was also ordered to pay several million dollars in restitution to the victims of his Ponzi scheme. (In a Ponzi scheme, the perpetrator uses funds from new investors to pay earlier investors.)

Two partners were sentenced to prison as a result of their involvement in telemarketing fraud. According to the United States Attorney’s Office, the partners owned a telemarketing business and admitted that employees of that business used pre-text calling to obtain information from numerous companies across the United States.

In 2003, an insurance executive pled no contest and was found guilty on a single count of aggravated theft. The defendant admitted misappropriating money that was intended to pay medical claims for the local government’s self-insured health benefits plan. Acting as the health insurance agent for the local government, the executive failed to fully credit the government’s account for payment of the health insurance premiums after receiving two large checks.

A federal judge has ordered more than 24 years of prison time for a former loan officer who was found guilty on all eight counts of an indictment charging conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Several financial institutions identified unusual transactions related to the defendant and filed SARs. These SARs proved very helpful during the investigation.

In addition to prison time, the judge ordered three years of supervised release and for the defendant to pay restitution of over $5,000,000 as well as a monetary judgment of more than $1.5 million.

An illegal alien pleaded guilty to stealing Social Security numbers, fabricating names, and swindling almost $2 million dollars from credit card companies.

The defendant’s name surfaced in the course of an investigation into organized criminal activity. Suspicious Activity Reports document some of the most serious charges against the defendant.

Information from SARs helped unravel a complex fraudulent banking scheme in which victims lost thousands of dollars to fake investments and a multinational financial institution had its identity stolen.

In December 2002, the New York office of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s El Dorado Task Force identified numerous Suspicious Activity Reports that showed a pattern of suspicious financial transactions conducted by a company in the New York area. The company was identified as a money exchange business located in South America with several bank accounts in New York. The investigation revealed several companies and individuals utilizing the Black Market Peso Exchange to launder alien smuggling proceeds in violation of Title 18 U.S.C. 1956, Money Laundering.

In 2003, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents initiated an investigation of several non-profit organizations in the United States. These were all registered as tax-exempt organizations. The investigation revealed the organizations were operating as illegal wire remitting businesses, allegedly co-mingling drug proceeds with donations. Suspicious Activity Report documentation revealed approximately $3 million in transactions during a three-month period.

The United States Secret Service, New York Field Office, seized over $5.3 million from a correspondent account for a bank headquartered in Nigeria. Investigative leads derived from Bank Secrecy Act data determined that this account was actually owned by the Nigerian bank and operated by the bank’s president and chairman of the board of directors.

In what a federal prosecutor called “the most blatant currency structuring case” he had seen, a federal judge sentenced an 82-year-old man in March 2007 to 15 months in prison and ordered him to pay $110,000 in restitution to American victims of an international lottery scheme. The defendant had been involved in several suspicious investment schemes over the past few years, and numerous SARs document a string of unusual transactions. In addition, the investigating FBI agent reported that he would not have been able to make the case without the SARs.