An Arizona man was sentenced on May 22, 2024 in federal court in San Diego to 51 months in prison for conspiracy to commit access device fraud.
Luis Ramirez, 43, of Mesa, Arizona, was involved in a scheme to obtain and traffic “leads” containing financial information, including bank account numbers, from payday loan applications across the United States.
These leads were used by fraudsters to steal money from unsuspecting victims’ bank accounts. Ramirez also received a separate 120-month sentence in a different case prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California.
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Bashant ordered that 24 months of this sentence run consecutively, resulting in a total of 144 months in prison for Ramirez.
“Those who knowingly supply fraudsters with personal and financial information about potential victims cause enormous harm to the American public,” stated Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
Inspector in Charge Eric Shen of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s (USPIS) Criminal Investigations Group expressed the agency’s commitment to protecting consumers, noting that “small transactions were used to conceal the scheme, but that wasn’t enough to fool postal inspectors or keep us from adding it all together to put a halt to this fraud.”
Related cases have been filed against other participants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. In May 2023, a grand jury in Los Angeles indicted 14 defendants on RICO conspiracy and other charges.
These defendants allegedly debited consumers’ bank accounts without authorization and used shell entities and “micro debits” to conceal the fraudulent activity.
Harold Sobel, another scheme participant, pleaded guilty to bank fraud conspiracy in Las Vegas and was sentenced to 42 months in prison in December 2022.
The case against Ramirez was investigated by the USPIS.
Trial Attorneys Wei Xiang, Meredith Healy, and Amy Kaplan of the Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch prosecuted the case, with support from the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Central and Southern Districts of California.
