Indian American man sentenced for telephone fraud

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An Indian-American man, Anandkumar Jayantila Nayee, has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for cheating victims in a telephone fraud scheme.

According to Benjamin Greenberg, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Nayee made approximately $150,000 in victim losses during the telephone fraud scheme.

His co-conspirators instructed victims to deposit payments related to the taxes or fees that they purportedly owed onto debit cards and into bank accounts controlled by Nayee and his co-conspirators. Nayee et al then received and retained those payments.

According to court papers, from January 2014 through February 28, 2014, a co-conspirator purchased Green Dot prepaid debit cards and provided the full debit card numbers to Nayee, who lived in India at the time.

Nayee then allowed the prepaid debit cards to be registered in the names of others and notified his co-conspirator once the cards had been funded by victims.

The co-conspirator then used the prepaid debit cards to purchase money orders and deposited them into bank accounts specified by Nayee who had moved to Miami in 2015.

He and his co-conspirators picked up funds that had been sent via money transfer by the victims and deposited those funds into accounts controlled by Nayee and his co-conspirators.

According to court documents, Nayee was previously convicted of defrauding victims in an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) impersonator scam which took place from January 2014 to early 2017 where his co-conspirators contacted victims by telephone and made fraudulent representations to them, including that the victims owed income tax payments to the IRS or owed fees for grants or loans that they had purportedly received.