Information for Victims in Large Cases

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. 

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.

Victor Btesh, Bruce Fish, BDF Enterprises, Inc. d/b/a “The Big Lebowski”, Michelle’s DVD Funhouse, Inc. d/b/a “The Amazing Express”, MJR Prime, LLC d/b/a “Ready 2 Go”, and Prime Brooklyn, LLC d/b/a “Super Super Fast”, knowingly entered into and engaged in a combination and conspiracy to suppress and eliminate competition by fixing prices for DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs sold through the Amazon Marketplace platform to customers located throughout the United States. The charged conspiracy began at least as early as October 2016 and continued until at least October 29, 2019. All indicted defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

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.

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.

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.

Defendant owned and controlled various businesses, both in the United States and abroad, including Erie Marketing LLC with a principal place of business in Sandusky, Ohio.  Though Defendant’s own role is disputed, it is alleged that those businesses engaged in a fraudulent binary options scheme using tradenames such as “OptionMint,” “OptionKing,” and, “OptionQueen.” These were neither licensed nor regulated and operated much differently from regulated exchanges. Defendant did not connect his investors to a legitimate binary options exchange that would match investors who chose different binary option outcomes. Instead, Defendant took the opposing position on each trade and thus only made money when investors lost their money, providing a built-in incentive to employ a variety of manipulative and deceptive practices. Victims were solicited through Internet marketing campaigns and international call centers.  Victims were given accounts on fraudulent platforms and they paid foreign payment processors by credit card.  More than $10 million in credit card payments were directed to Defendant’s companies.  It is alleged there may be over 5000 individual victims involved in this scheme.

Emmanuel Hourizadeh and Raymond Nouvahian engaged in a conspiracy to fix prices for DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs sold through the Amazon Marketplace platform to customers located throughout the United States.  The charged conspiracy began at least as early as November 2017 and continued to on or about October 29, 2019.

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.

Morris Sutton engaged in a conspiracy to fix prices for DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs sold through the Amazon Marketplace platform to customers located throughout the United States. The charged conspiracy began at least as early as November 2017 and continued to on or about October 29, 2019.

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.

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.