Indian Americans Vijay Verma and Tarsem Lal owned a jewelry store in New Jersey.
The US Department of Justice sentenced two Indian Americans on Monday for perpetrating one of the largest credit card fraud schemes ever charged by the Justice Department.
Vijay Verma and Tarsem Lal, both of Iselin, New Jersey, were sentenced to 14 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement. In addition, Judge Thompson sentenced Verma to three years of supervised release and Lal to three years of probation. They would also pay $5,000 in fine, and are ordered to pay $451,259 in forfeiture.
Verma, 49, and Lal, 78, fabricated more than 7,000 false identities to get tens of thousands of credit cards. They were indicted in October 2013. Both had pleaded guilty before US District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court to information charging them with one count of access device fraud.
According to the details of the case issued by the Justice Department, “Participants in the scheme doctored credit reports to pump up the spending and borrowing power associated with the cards. They then borrowed or spent as much as they could, based on the phony credit history, but did not repay the debts – causing more than $200 million in confirmed losses to businesses and financial institutions.”
The statement continued: “These debts were incurred at Verma’s jewelry store, among many other locations, where Verma would allow fraudulently obtained credit cards to be swiped in phony transactions.”
Apparently, Verma and Lal created a detailed network of false identities. They maintained more than 1800 fake addresses including houses, apartments and post office boxes, all across the US, which they used as the mailing addresses for the false identities.
Over the past three fiscal years, the Department of Justice has filed more than 10,000 financial fraud cases against nearly 15,000 defendants including more than 2,700 mortgage fraud defendants.