Information for Victims in Large Cases

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.

Sorin Becheru was indicted by a Dallas-based federal grand jury for conspiring to commit fraud in connection with access devices from March 2016 through May 2018. On March 3, 2022, the FBI completed the removal of Becheru from Romania to the Northern District of Texas. According to the indictment, Becheru and his co-conspirators allegedly used point-of-sale memory scraping malware to obtain consumers’ credit card information from victim servers located in the U.S. They then allegedly sold the numbers on darkweb carding forums, including “Vendetta” and “Tony Montana.” Buyers used the stolen credit card numbers to purchase goods and services. Becheru—who used various online identities, including t0r.creep.im, turan1@jabbim.com, and buchetta@jabb3r.de — allegedly possessed and sold credit card information for millions of cards. At one point, Becheru was in possession of information for more than 240,000 credit cards belonging to victims located in the Northern District of Texas and elsewhere. Becheru is awaiting trial, which is scheduled to begin on August 28, 2023.

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.

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. 

A grand jury charged the defendants with participating in a criminal enterprise that operated thirteen different moving companies in multiple locations through the United States. The criminal enterprise enriched itself by defrauding, extorting, and stealing from customers who hired the moving companies to move their household goods. Specifically, the criminal enterprise lied to customers about the company's experience and record, provided low binding estimates to secure moving jobs, loaded the customers' household goods into moving trucks, and then illegally demanded money above the binding estimate based on fraudulent calculations of space used by the goods. Customers were required to pay falsely inflated prices to retrieve their possessions and, in some cases, never received their possessions at all. The criminal enterprise protected and perpetuated itself by concealing and misrepresenting the owners, operators, employees, and operations of their moving companies. This fraud was accomplished through a number of different means, including the preparation and submission to federal regulators and to third-party companies of documents containing false information and the use of fake drivers' licenses for the purported owners of the moving companies to further the criminal enterprise.

In June 2020, the website cityxguide.com (“CityXGuide”)—a leading source of online advertisements for prostitution and sex trafficking—was seized by Homeland Security Investigations pursuant to a warrant.  Wilhan Martono, the creator, owner, and operator of CityXGuide, was charged in a 28-count indictment with promotion of prostitution and reckless disregard of sex trafficking, interstate racketeering conspiracy (facilitating prostitution), interstate transportation in aid of racketeering (facilitating prostitution), and money laundering.  In August 2021, Martono pled guilty to Promotion and Facilitation of Prostitution and Reckless Disregard of Sex Trafficking in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2421A and Conspiracy to Engage in Interstate and Foreign Travel and Transportation In Aid of Racketeering Enterprises in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.

Martono created, owned, and operated a network of websites, including CityXGuide, that posted hundreds of thousands of prostitution advertisements in locations across the United States and around the world.  CityXGuide allowed pimps, prostitutes, and brothels to post and pay for advertisements that featured an explicit list of “intimate activities,” along with nude or partially nude photographs, a physical description, work hours, methods of payment, and contact information for the female being advertised. 

Martono purchased the domain names of CityXGuide and its related websites, purchased and maintained the servers that hosted the websites, and purchased the server space, server equipment, and blocks of Internet Protocol (“IP”) addresses—including more than 95 unique IP addresses—to operate the websites.