14 DAY TRIAL // A Romanian national implicated in fraud operations on popular online markets was sentenced on Thursday to serve 63 months in prison and pay more than $600,000 / €484,000 in restitution.
Razvan Caprarescu, 39, from Bucharest, Romania, has been indicted in two states in the US for conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and for use and attempted use of a forged Belgian passport.
Stolen money was sent to members of the group in Romania
The fraudster pleaded guilty to both charges and also gave details of the scheme he was involved in, which consisted in listing vehicles for sale on different online market places, eBay being one of them.
According to the FBI, the scheme ran for seven months, from October 2011 until June 2012, and made 35 victims, who sent about $690,000 / €556,000 to bank accounts opened by Caprarescu and one co-conspirator. Most of the money was sent back to Romania, to other members of the group.
The details of the scheme are not complicated; the crooks would list fake products on trading websites like eBay and wait for the potential victims to make contact for a purchase.
In this case, the products were vehicles, so the transactions involved pretty large sums of money, which is one of the reasons why the fraudsters were reported.
In similar other operations, if the sums involved were little, the victims would not report the loss and the fraudsters would not be pursued by the authorities.
When the details of the fake purchase would be all set up, the victims would be directed to wire the money to bank accounts set up by the criminals. This was done using false identities backed by fake identification documents, like the passport found on Caprarescu.
Other Romanians are still on the run
The investigation was carried out through collaboration between multiple law enforcement agencies (Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation).
Some of the schemes run on eBay and similar websites were quite complex as the crooks would go to great lengths to pull off the deceit, such as creating fake invoices that would look identical to original ones.
At the moment, at the top of FBI’s list of most wanted cybercriminals is Nicolae Popescu, a Romanian man believed to be the leader of a crime group specialized in online fraud of this kind.
The FBI offers a bounty of up to $1 million / €796,000 for details that can help authorities place Popescu under arrest. It is estimated that the gang he led made $3 / €2.394 million from the criminal activity.
