Dive Brief:
- A payments processing broker who was part of a criminal ring that set up fake online marketing firms to bilk consumers and businesses was sentenced to three years of prison on Monday, after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud in April, the Department of Justice said in a press release.
- The broker, Jeremy Todd Briley, 47, also faces three years of supervised release as part of his sentence after he is released from prison, the DOJ said.
- In addition, Briley, of Happy Valley, Oregon, must forfeit $460,000 that were part of his ill-gotten gains from the the fraudulent scheme, under the criminal court proceedings.
Dive Insight:
The punishment meted out to Briley comes after he and a network of nine other individuals bilked victims in the U.S. of $14 million by creating the marketing firms that purportedly offered services, but in reality used those fronts to take unauthorized payments from thousands of bank accounts, according to a DOJ release last year.
Last year, the Justice Department barred the ten individuals from operating their fraudulent scheme in an action that ultimately landed Briley’s case in criminal court. An initial civil complaint against some members of the ring was unsealed in December 2023.
Briley set up relationships with payments processors so that he could handled the sham charges from the fake marketing firms, between February 2017 and December 2023, according to the release.
“Despite repeatedly receiving information that the debits processed on behalf of the sham companies were not authorized by the victims, Briley concealed the fraudulent activities of the sham companies in various ways, and he arranged for a payment processor to deceive banks by manipulating return rates on the fraudulent debits,” the release from DOJ on Monday said.
The DOJ’s criminal division, and its Southern District of Florida office, as well as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service Criminal Investigations Group and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Office of Inspector General were involved in the case.
Briley’s attorney couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
