Indian-origin man from Bellevue sentenced to prison for defrauding his employer

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Arunkumar Singal, a former manager of a Snoqualmie, Washington medical device company, was sentenced to 14 months in prison on June 4, 2021 in U.S. District Court in Seattle for defrauding his employer of nearly $800,000 in used equipment sales.

Singal, 42, pleaded guilty to wire fraud on January 3, 2020, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington.

Singal is a citizen of India and will likely be deported following his prison term.

According to records filed in the case, in 2014 Singal was the director of Global Product Support at Spacelabs Healthcare Inc. He was put in charge of a new initiative to resell used equipment.

But instead of selling the equipment to the highest bidder as he was supposed to do, Singal devised a scheme to have a Texas company bid on the equipment at a very low price, and then used a shell company Singal himself created to purchase the equipment for a ten percent increase in profit to the Texas company.

Singal then turned around and sold the equipment at a much higher price to a Minnesota company. Singal made a profit of more than $780,000.

He used the money made by fraud to pay down the mortgage on his luxury Mercer Island home and to buy a Tesla, among other expenditures.  The scheme unraveled when tech support workers doing regular maintenance on Singal’s company cell phone reported messages that appeared to indicate side deals not authorized by the company.

The company fired Singal and reported potential fraud to the Snoqualmie Police Department who alerted the FBI.

As part of the plea deal, Singal sold the Mercer Island home and paid restitution to Spacelabs of $780,163.