A New York man is accused of milking a Newton senior citizen out of almost half 1,000,000 {dollars} by means of an elaborate rip-off allegedly involving narcotics, the DEA, the FBI and the U.S. Treasury Division.
Vishual Kumar, 23, of Queens, New York, appeared in Middlesex Superior Court docket and was formally charged with extortion, larceny over $250 from an individual over 60, and conspiracy. He’s accused of extorting and defrauding a 72-year-old Newton lady out of greater than $480,000.
Kumar was ordered held in jail in lieu of $500,000 money bail forward of his subsequent listening to date of April 2.
Middlesex District Legal professional Marian Ryan stated the scheme “illustrates several common aspects of these financial scams.”
“The defendant and his alleged co-conspirators used multiple points of contact to build trust, they posed as official government agents, assigned a ‘case worker’ in an effort to appear helpful to the victim and even created fake documents to serve as receipts,” she stated.
Prosecutors say Kumar contacted the lady final December below the pretense that he was a Drug Enforcement Administration agent investigating a case during which narcotics traffickers had opened almost two dozen financial institution accounts in her identify.
The lady was advised that she was accountable for the $2 million in these accounts being utilized in unlawful drug transactions.
The lady was advised that to cease the identification theft, she must switch all her belongings to the U.S. Treasury and that she would then be issued a brand new Social Safety quantity and have the belongings returned to her, in accordance with prosecutors.
However the alleged DEA brokers proposed a cool approach of transferring these belongings: the lady was to buy gold bars and hand the bars off to plenty of couriers over a month.
The lady, scared of the risk that the FBI would arrest her, prosecutors say, adopted the directions and liquidated tons of of hundreds of {dollars} from her retirement financial savings to purchase gold bars after which handed the bars over to the bagmen.
The lady’s household realized of the scheme and reported it. Prosecutors say Kumar was caught when an actual FBI agent went undercover to ship the newest spherical of gold bars.
“These scams thrive in secrecy,” DA Ryan stated. “Fortunately, in this case, the victim and her family were able to enlist the help of law enforcement within a fairly short period of time which put a stop to this exploitation but not before the victim suffered a staggering loss of nearly half a million dollars.”
