An Indian-American from Maryland, who has been living illegally in the United States, pleaded guilty March 22 to a conspiracy to launder millions of dollars of fraud proceeds obtained from victims through a variety of scams.
Kaushik Kanti Modi, 43, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, agreed to forfeit $902,678.08, the amount involved in the money laundering offense that the government has seized or restrained, according to a press release of the by U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein.
Modi faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison after U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz’s scheduled sentencing of Modi May 12.
According to his plea agreement, Modi was instructed by conspirators to buy large numbers of stored value cards, principally GreenDot cards, and to forward the PIN numbers of the cards to other unidentified co-conspirators. Modi’s co-conspirators loaded money onto the stored value cards using a variety of scams. Some of the money came from calls made by persons impersonating as IRS employees. They convinced innocent taxpayers that they owed taxes to the IRS, and needed to send money to the co-conspirators to avoid arrest and incarceration.
On at least two occasions, the U.S. Attorney’s office said, the victims of the IRS impersonation fraud deposited money directly into accounts held in Modi’s name. Other money was derived by offering merchandise for sale on the internet and then failing to provide the merchandise once money was received from the victim-purchaser.
After money was loaded on the stored value cards, Modi was instructed to use the cards to buy MoneyGram money orders at Walmart stores, and then to deposit those money orders into bank accounts either in Modi’s name or the names of others. From January 1, 2014 to March 24, 2015, Modi deposited 241 money orders totaling $2,077,308.20 into his bank accounts. Moreover, Modi frequently bought the money orders using stored value cards that were activated using the identification of identity theft victims.
“Criminal conspiracies such as this are loathsome crimes that victimize our nation’s honest taxpayers,” said Thomas Jankowski, Special Agent in Charge, IRS Criminal Investigation, Washington D.C. Field Office.
At the time of his arrest, Modi admitted that he knew that something was not right about the source of the money involved in the transactions, and accordingly, knew that the purpose of those transactions was to conceal the proceeds of unlawful activity.
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