On Tuesday, a federal grand jury indicted a person from West Los Angeles for operating a telemarketing rip-off that focused aged victims over the course of a decade, leading to fraudulent good points of greater than $4.5 million.
Michael Alexai Dragunov, 44, together with Christopher Michael Lang, 42, an confederate from Kansas, every face 10 fees in complete for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud associated to telemarketing and e mail advertising campaigns aimed on the aged.
From August 2013 to June 2023, Dragunov and Lang allegedly posed as representatives of firms providing promoting and associated providers to present or former timeshare house owners, based on the indictment. The defendants used aliases, Skype telephone numbers, and fictitious transactions to cover their identities and make their telemarketing firms seem professional.
The victims had been tricked into signing agreements with Dragunov and Lang’s fraudulent telemarketing firms, which claimed to assist promote or lease their timeshare properties for a single promoting payment. In actuality, the victims by no means acquired the promised providers or cash, even after paying recurring charges totaling lots of of 1000’s of {dollars} over a number of years.
The boys allegedly went to nice lengths to maintain up the facade of their fraudulent telemarketing companies, together with making “lots of of phony small transactions” on the businesses’ cost processing accounts.
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To extract more cash from victims, Dragunov and Lang allegedly employed numerous misleading techniques, together with falsely assuring victims that the charges can be refunded or reimbursed, asserting that victims nonetheless owed taxes on their timeshare properties, and warning that any makes an attempt to dispute funds would end result within the lack of all funds and proceeds from potential timeshare gross sales or leases.
If convicted, the lads might face a most sentence of 30 years in federal jail.
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