Third person sentenced in email scam that nearly cost city of Lexington $3.9 million
A New Jersey man who took part in a scheme that nearly cost the city of Lexington $3.9 million has been sentenced to six years in federal prison.
Jean Mejia-Garcia also is required with two other defendants to repay $4.6 million under the sentence.
People involved in the scam posed as non-profit organizations or vendors and contacted cities, businesses and individuals and tricked them into sending payments, according to court records. The tactic is known as a business email compromise scheme.
Lexington was able to recoup the money it wired to scammers, but dozens of other government agencies and businesses across the country couldn’t.
Those losses are the basis for the $4.6 million restitution order.
After the victims wired payments to accounts controlled by people involved in the scam, the leader, Nana Kwabena Amuah, notified others in the conspiracy to move it out, according to the court record.
The ring victimized Lexington in August 2022, impersonating someone from the Community Action Council, which was working with the city on a housing project.
The scammer got a city employee to wire $3.9 million that the city owed the non-profit.
The employee wired the money to a Truist Bank account the scammers controlled, but the bank and the city got it back.
Mejia-Garcia’s role in the scheme was to obtain identifying information on real people, use it to set up bank accounts for shell companies, and then move the money once it came in from victims, according to a sentencing memorandum from Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn M. Dieruf.
Mejia-Garcia, of North Bergen, N.J., pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and aggravate identity theft.
He played a key role in the conspiracy because “the availability of money launderers in the United States willing to steal identities, deceive financial institutions, and receive and transfer proceeds enables the proliferation of this type of fraud, perpetrated by individuals sitting behind a keyboard or on a telephone thousands of miles away, targeting American businesses,” Dieruf said in the sentencing memo.
U.S District Judge Karen K. Caldwell sentenced Mejia-Garcia Tuesday in federal court in Lexington.
Amuah and a Texas woman, Shimea McDonald, also pleaded guilty in the case.
The judge sentenced Amuah to seven years and two months in prison and McDonald to six years and eight months, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
They also are liable with Mejia-Garcia for the $4.6 million in restitution.
Federal authorities identified more than 70 victims who wired money to the network of scammers. About 60 lost money to the scheme, according to the prosecution memo.
The prosecution memo cited one business that had to close because of the losses, and said another victim had to take $200,000 from a retirement account to repay a vendor that the scammers impersonated.
One woman paid $57,000 she thought was going toward her stepmother’s care at a retirement home, but after the scammers took the money, she had to go to court to keep her stepmother from being evicted because the payment was still outstanding, according to the memo.
A list of victims in Amuah’s case did not publicly identify any others in Kentucky.
