Two Las Vegas men indicted in Pittsburgh two years ago on charges of operating the “grandparent scam” in which criminals pose as court officials to scare old people into giving up money to get grandchildren out of jail are on trial in U.S. District Court, while a third cohort has admitted his guilt.
This kind of fraud has become increasingly prevalent across the U.S., and the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh has brought several similar prosecutions in recent years.
In the current case, Roderick Feurtado, 56, and Tarek Bouanane, 47, went on trial Monday before U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan. The third, Roberto Gutierrez, 51, of suburban Los Angeles pleaded guilty a few weeks ago to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Homeland Security agents and state police said the three stole some $250,000, maybe more, from elderly victims in Western Pennsylvania.
The grandparent scheme typically involves shysters telling an older person that a grandchild is in jail or otherwise in legal trouble and needs money to make bail. Then other criminal cohorts show up pretending to be bail-bondsmen to pick up the money.
So it was with these three, prosecutors say. Bouanane and Gutierrez were the fake bondsmen, according to investigators, and drove to elderly victims’ homes to collect cash. Feurtado acted as the so-called “safehouse” who gathered the money from the other two and kept track of expenses.
Gutierrez and Bouanane communicated using Signal, an encrypted messaging app, in talking to Feurtado and others outside the area. Feurtado kept the money in his hotel room along with a ledger of cash pickups.
When agents and cops searched the hotel room, they found more than $220,000 in cash and the ledger. Searches of phones revealed further information about how the men communicated.
The government said one conspirator would call a victim posing as a lawyer and saying bail money was needed. Sometimes one of the criminals even posed as the grandchild in making phone calls. They also told the grandparents that there was a gag order on the case to keep them from telling others, in addition to promising that the money would be paid back at some point.
Many potential victims are wise to this ruse, but for those who fell for it, the conspirators called back and asked for more money for various legal fees.
Prosecutors have sought to forfeit $250,920 seized from the defendants and another $5,000 from a JP Morgan Chase account they had set up.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
