Information for Victims in Large Cases
United States v. Onur Aksoy a/k/a “Ron Aksoy” a/k/a “Dave Durden” (Pro Network)
From 2013 through 2022, the defendant, Onur Aksoy, ran a massive operation, broadly named “Pro Network,” to traffic in counterfeit and fraudulent Cisco networking devices. Aksoy and his coconspirators then resold these devices in the United States and around the world, falsely representing them as new, genuine, and high-quality Cisco products. Aksoy trafficked in and resold tens of thousands of such counterfeit and fraudulent devices, which carried an estimated retail value of more than one billion dollars.
United States v. Joseph Sullivan
Failure by former Uber CSO, Joseph Sullivan, to disclose 2016 breach to affected UBER drivers. Hackers revealed that they had accessed and downloaded an Uber database containing the personally identifying information “PII” of approx. 600,000 drivers.
United States v. Amplify Energy Corp., Beta Operating Company, LLC, and San Pedro Bay Pipeline Company
On December 15, 2021, Amplify Energy Corp., Beta Operating Company, LLC, and San Pedro Bay Pipeline Company were indicted on one count of negligent discharge of oil into the contiguous zone of the United States (33 U.S.C. §§ 1321(b)(3), 1319(c)(1)(A)), in a case arising out of the oil spill off of Huntington Beach, California on October 1 and 2, 2021. According to the indictment, defendants own and operate the 17-mile-long San Pedro Bay Pipeline that transports oil from offshore platforms to Long Beach, California. The indictment alleges that, on October 1 and 2, 2021, defendants illegally discharged oil into the Pacific Ocean by acting negligently in at least six different ways in response to the Pipeline’s leak alarms. As a result of the discharge, approximately 25,000 gallons of crude oil leaked from the Pipeline into the San Pedro Bay.
United States v. Tanner Roughton
Defendant Tanner Roughton is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of wire fraud, and one count of filing a false tax returns. The charges stem from Roughton’s participation in scheme to defraud buyers and sellers of two cryptocurrencies by manipulating the price of the cryptocurrencies through various means, including the release of false statements designed to bolster the sale price and generate trading volume, and matched trades with a co-schemer and others to further generate trading volume. The charges allege that Roughton sold the cryptocurrencies for a profit and knowingly failed to report his profits on his tax returns.
U.S. v. Moshe Porat (21-CR-00170), and U.S. v. Isaac Gottlieb, et al. (21-CR-00160)
The defendant and his co-conspirators provided false information to college ranking publications about statistical data relating to Temple University's Fox School of Business. U.S. News relied on these false and misleading representations and ranked Fox's OMBA program number one in the country four years in a row. U.S. News also ranked Fox's PMBA program as high as number seven in 2017. The defendant marketed the fraudulently inflated rankings to potential Fox applicants, students, and donors in order to obtain money from them.
Case Name: US v. Sorin Becheru
Sorin Becheru was indicted by a Dallas-based federal grand jury for conspiring to commit fraud in connection with access devices from March 2016 through May 2018. On March 3, 2022, the FBI completed the removal of Becheru from Romania to the Northern District of Texas. According to the indictment, Becheru and his co-conspirators allegedly used point-of-sale memory scraping malware to obtain consumers’ credit card information from victim servers located in the U.S. They then allegedly sold the numbers on darkweb carding forums, including “Vendetta” and “Tony Montana.” Buyers used the stolen credit card numbers to purchase goods and services. Becheru—who used various online identities, including t0r.creep.im, turan1@jabbim.com, and buchetta@jabb3r.de — allegedly possessed and sold credit card information for millions of cards. At one point, Becheru was in possession of information for more than 240,000 credit cards belonging to victims located in the Northern District of Texas and elsewhere. Becheru is awaiting trial, which is scheduled to begin on August 28, 2023.
United States v. Greenlaw, et al (UDF)
On January 21, 2021, a jury convicted defendants Hollis Morrison Greenlaw, Benjamin Lee Wissink, Cara Delin Obert, and Jeffrey Brandon Jester of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and eight substantive counts of securities fraud. Between January 2011 and December 2015, the defendants engaged in a scheme to defraud using investment fund entities known as United Development Funding III LP, United Development Funding IV, and United Development Funding Income Fund V (collectively "UDF entities"). The UDF entities were based out of Grapevine, Texas.
U.S. v. Haykaz Mansuryan et al; 21-CR-2660-BAS
This case charges a ring of fraudsters who used skimming devices to steal unwitting victims’ account information from gas pumps, ATMs, and similar common points of sale. The defendants then allegedly used that information to make fraudulent debit and credit cards, which they used to withdraw cash from victims’ accounts and make fraudulent withdrawals and purchase goods in the mount of hundreds of thousands of dollars using funds on the accounts of unwitting victims. According to the indictment, these crimes were committed in and around southern California and elsewhere.
U.S. v. Jonathan Donohue
Jonathan Donohue controlled two websites from which he sold Distributed Denial of Service (“DDOS”) attacks. From January 10, 2017 through June 22, 2017, Donohue launched 179,951 DDOS attacks against 78,214 unique IP addresses.
United States v. MATJAZ SKORJANC, FLORENCIO CARRO RUIZ, MENTOR LENIQI, And THOMAS KENNEDY MCCORMICK
In December, 2018, the defendant McCormick, an American, and three others were charged by indictment with a racketeering conspiracy to develop and distribute malware through the major computer hacking forum known as Darkode. Arrest warrants are still outstanding for Skorjanc, a Slovenian national, Mentor Leneqi, a Serbian, and Florencio Ruiz, a Spaniard. The other foreign countries have declined to extradite the other three defendants to the U.S. for prosecution, but they remain fugitives from justice here in the United States.
Thomas McCormick, pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. The racketeering conspiracy charge includes conspiracy to commit bank, wire, and access device fraud, identity theft, hacking, and extortion.
U.S. v. Glenn Arcaro; 21-CR-02542-TWR
This case charges the defendant of participating in a massive conspiracy involving BitConnect, a cryptocurrency investment scheme, which defrauded investors from the Unites States and abroad of over $2 billion. The defendant admitted that he and others conspired to mislead investors about BitConnect’s purported technology, known as the “BitConnect Trading Bot” and “Volatility Software,” as being able to generate substantial profits and guaranteed returns by using investors’ money to trade on the volatility of cryptocurrency exchange markets. The BitConnect scheme is believed to be the largest cryptocurrency fraud ever charged criminally. According to the Information, these wire fraud crimes were committed in and around the Southern District of California, across the United States, and internationally.
United States v. Shuklin et al.
A grand jury charged the defendants with participating in a criminal enterprise that operated thirteen different moving companies in multiple locations through the United States. The criminal enterprise enriched itself by defrauding, extorting, and stealing from customers who hired the moving companies to move their household goods. Specifically, the criminal enterprise lied to customers about the company's experience and record, provided low binding estimates to secure moving jobs, loaded the customers' household goods into moving trucks, and then illegally demanded money above the binding estimate based on fraudulent calculations of space used by the goods. Customers were required to pay falsely inflated prices to retrieve their possessions and, in some cases, never received their possessions at all. The criminal enterprise protected and perpetuated itself by concealing and misrepresenting the owners, operators, employees, and operations of their moving companies. This fraud was accomplished through a number of different means, including the preparation and submission to federal regulators and to third-party companies of documents containing false information and the use of fake drivers' licenses for the purported owners of the moving companies to further the criminal enterprise.