Serial Fraudster Sentenced to 84 Months in Prison for Defrauding a California Electronics Manufacturer

MINNEAPOLIS – Thomas Thanh Pham has been sentenced to 84 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release for defrauding an electronics manufacturing business, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson. The defendant was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $2,943,840.

“Fraudsters have flocked to Minnesota for far too long,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson. “Pham is no exception. He is a serial fraudster who has demonstrated that he will not stop until he is stopped. Thanks to the hard work of law enforcement, for the next 84 months, Pham will be where he belongs—in prison.”

“Bad actors like Pham take advantage of hardworking Americans in order to enrich themselves by defrauding others,” said Special Agent in Charge Alvin M. Winston Sr. of FBI Minneapolis. “With this sentence, Pham has been held accountable for his crimes. The FBI and our partners will continue working to stop schemes like this one and protect the public from being exploited.”

Between 2019 and 2020, Thomas Thanh Pham, 53, of Burnsville, devised a scheme to defraud a California based company of approximately $1.2 million. Pham, who was the CEO of Enterprise Products, LLC, purported to provide consulting and financial services to commercial clients involved in engineering and manufacturing. Pham held himself out as a broker with supposed business relationships with large, well-known companies. As a supposed broker, Pham claimed he could arrange service agreements between an electronic manufacturing services company based in San Jose, California (identified as Victim A), and his ostensible business affiliates in the electronics and technology sectors.

Pham began a series of discussions with Victim A, in which Pham pitched that Enterprise Products could facilitate multi-million-dollar manufacturing and repair contracts between Victim A and large electronics companies.  None of that was true.  To give the appearance of legitimacy, Pham arranged for a friend of his to pose as a corporate executive with Pham and Victim A in supposed contract negotiations. Unbeknownst to Victim A, Pham’s associate was not a business executive.  In fact, Pham’s “business executive associate” was a fellow ex-convict whom Pham met while serving a prior federal prison sentence for fraud.

Pham supplied Victim A with bogus documents, including fabricated contracts, correspondence, and business proposals.  As part of the scheme, Pham first required Victim A to pay a “deposit bond” in the amount of $1,278,000. Pham’s fraudulent tactics resulted in Victim A agreeing to enter into a contract in September 2019, through which Victim A ostensibly would receive millions of dollars in exchange for repair services. Pham unsuccessfully pitched other phony deals to Victim A that purportedly involved even larger financial contracts deals with other companies.

As part of the scheme and to give the impression that he was fulfilling the fraudulent contract, Pham caused the initial delivery to Victim A in California of approximately 20 samples of electronic devices that supposedly required repairs by Victim A. However, Pham failed to disclose to Victim A that these 20 “sample” devices were, in fact, stolen property. Pham then lulled Victim A into a false sense of security by offering a series of excuses and promises when Victim A either inquired about its money or demanded a refund. Rather than maintain the money securely in a refundable escrow as promised, Pham fraudulently misappropriated Victim A’s funds for a series of unauthorized uses and transactions.

Pham received his first criminal conviction 32 years ago.  Since that time, he has been convicted of numerous fraud offenses, as follows:

• Felony Theft of Property, in which Pham unlawfully took a victim’s identifiers in order to fraudulently purchase a $49,000 car.
• Felony False Statements for Property, in which Pham knowingly false statement to fraudulently purchase a vehicle valued at more than $20,000.
• Felony Unlawful Possession of Fraudulent Identification, in which Pham knowingly possessed identification documents of a victim without permission for purposes of defrauding the victim.
• Securing Execution of Document by Deception (Felony), in which Pham attempted to pass a forged check.
• Multiple felony check forgeries.
• Conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a federal fraud conviction out of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, which Pham used the identities of victim companies to defraud victims out of $1.9 million by deceiving them into shipping high-dollar electronics and computers.

In handing down the sentence today, Judge Ericksen commented that Pham has “proven [himself] to be an efficient and effective perpetrator of fraud” whose crime was “part of a skilled execution of a scheme that he has refined over decades.”  At the conclusion of today’s hearing, Judge Ericksen immediately remanded Pham into custody at the government’s request, noting it “was too dangerous and too risky” to the public for Pham “to remain at liberty.”

This case is the result of an investigation conducted by the FBI.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew S. Ebert and Rebecca E. Kline prosecuted the case.